The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes On the Nation’s Worst School District
By Richard Whitmire
Jossey-Bass, 2011, $24.95; 270 pages.

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Soon after her widely publicized appointment as chancellor of the Washington, D.C., schools, Michelle Rhee devoted a day to school visits, some of them unannounced. At one, an odd thing happened. When Rhee and her party rang the bell at the entrance, the principal herself opened the gate and gazed at them questioningly. She had no idea who Rhee was.

That’s the first of many anecdotes in Richard Whitmire’s fast-moving chronicle of Rhee’s life and career that impart the strange, dismaying world of public schools in the nation’s capital. He focuses on her tense three-and-a-half-year tenure, the battle lines remembered by everyone—Rhee vs. the city council, Rhee vs. the teachers unions, vs. the Washington Post, vs. black parents. What isn’t as familiar, and sometimes downright perverse, are the many bizarre yet customary conditions under which Rhee operated, which Whitmire portrays in illuminating (and infuriating) detail.

The opening chapters chronicle Rhee’s pre-D.C. life. We learn of a pleasant childhood in Toledo, Ohio, college days at Cornell, training with Teach For America, three grueling but successful years in a Baltimore elementary school, leadership of The New Teacher Project, and testimony at an arbitration hearing where the New York Department of Education squared off against Randi Weingarten and the United Federation of Teachers (“She was dazzling,” former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein tells Whitmire). The aim is to humanize the portrait of Rhee against the prevailing caricature of an imperious, rude Asian woman, insensitive to poor blacks.

Several facts are striking or amusing in light of her later fame. When her little brother fared poorly in school, she was grounded. Her mother sent her away to college not to get a degree but to find a husband. At Teach For America, she proudly donned an “anti-Bush” button. In her first year of teaching, evaluators advised her, “We believe your classroom is a dangerous place for children and we think you should reconsider this career.” For a time at Cornell, a friend recalls, Rhee didn’t want to date any white men.

When Rhee enters the chancellor’s position, though, the narrative switches to a different reality:

• In spite of terrible test scores, in the year before Rhee’s arrival not one teacher was let go for ineffectiveness.

• One school Rhee visited was built for 600 students but had only 83.

• Twenty-seven D.C. schools faced restructuring for failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress, but when Rhee investigated, she says, “Most of the people I talked to were like, ‘What is restructuring? What is AYP?’”

• When Rhee closed 23 (!) dreadful schools, some of the loudest protesters were those with the most to gain: parents of students.

• When Rhee was blocked from firing staff, she found them so incompetent that she told them to stay home.

• Her fierce efforts to improve schools with high black enrollment often earned her credit for a “white agenda.”

Rhee’s outsider status helped her enact reforms against these nonsensical circumstances and brave the repugnance of the Washington Teachers’ Union, Washington Post columnists, and city council members. Unfortunately, it also kept her from recognizing the full import of her decisions. At one point, as she waits for tardy D.C. city council member Marion Barry outside a failing elementary school, she drifts across the street to chat with residents. They tell her, “We don’t need another boarded-up building in this neighborhood.” When she puts bad and weak teachers on notice, she doesn’t realize that she’s targeting a historic avenue of middle-class employment for African Americans in the city.

The mismatch between Rhee’s vision and local culture pops up again and again. She insisted that the most important factor in a classroom is the quality of the teacher, but Nathan Saunders, then vice president of the teachers union, tells Whitmire, “That doesn’t work in our community.” Religion and extended family play that role, the teacher belonging to a “system” in which “you were apt to lose your children, where harm could come to the child or the family unit.” She spoke with black parents frequently, holding more “living room” sessions in the all-black Ward 8 than anywhere else, Whitmire notes, but she underestimated the “respect” factor in the black community. At town hall meetings, parents rose up to chide her not so much for decisions she made, but for giving them no voice in the process. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote that “concerns raised by parents about Ms. Rhee’s take-no-prisoners approach were ignored. It was disrespectful.” Herbert said nothing about the nature of Rhee’s actual policies.

It is hard to weigh policies when roiling psycho-political attitudes unbalance the scales. In Whitmire’s telling, Rhee’s saga reveals that vested interests aren’t the only impediment to reform. True, the school system often functions as a jobs program for adults, but jobs and money aren’t the reason the mother of a second grader who has a derelict teacher regards someone pledging to fire the teacher as a demon. They don’t explain why administrators in an out-of-control school allow athletic coaches total control over their players. They don’t explain why high school counselors aren’t aware of their own school’s graduation requirements.

This is more than incompetence and guaranteed paychecks: It’s dysfunction, a creeping neurosis. Rhee came in and shocked the system. Her example has inspired others, Whitmire concludes, the strategy among reform-minded school leaders in 2011 being “Michelle Rhee without the drama.” One wonders, though, whether it wasn’t Rhee’s confrontational style that produced the advances in D.C. Keep the same policies but advocate them with “Michelle Lite” (Whitmire’s term) and the dysfunction might smoothly absorb them. Perhaps change can come only through conflict.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Ask a dozen educators why public schools seem to be in perpetual crisis and why successive reforms so often fall short and they’ll answer with familiar reasons: not enough money, union contracts, teacher certification, too much testing, NCLB…

Education policy researcher Rick Hess doesn’t always disagree, but he adds to the list a circumstance that traverses them all: Education reform itself is in a pathological condition. His title underscores the irrationality of the enterprise, “the same thing over and over,” as do the book’s many epithets to describe its workings (“aimless charade,” “frenzied tinkering,” “unduly attached,” “talismanic significance,” “ossified mantras,” “ill-conceived fad”). Reformers hype the latest solution to low test scores and high dropout rates as a stunning breakthrough, the future of schooling. Slogans such as “education is the new civil right” sound forthright, but they burden practical policy discussions with tense personal and ideological commitments.

It is true that the education establishment often meets reform proposals with heated denunciation:

…the education reform movement in Massachusetts and the nation is part of a decades-long corporate and government attack on public education and on our children.

Vouchers are designed to destroy public schools and end education as a public institution.

Our primary concern is that voucher programs could end up resembling the ethnic cleansing now occurring in Kosovo.

Such excessive expressions signify a psycho-political state, one that resembles a neurotic person who agonizes over this behavior and that feeling but never burrows down to deeper causes and structures. Reforms address class size, school size, teacher “dispositions,” parental choice, alternative certification, and other features of the system, but the basic machinery remains in place. The debates can be ferocious, Hess writes, but “seen from an arm’s length removed, the diagnoses generally amount to a concession that everyone can more or less go on about their business, so long as we demand more, do more, and spend more.”

To go beyond tinkering, he insists, we need an attitude adjustment. Certain basics of education policy have hardened into inevitabilities—the brick-and-mortar building and uniform learning goals, for example—and to put them on the table for examination strikes many as radical, irresponsible, or just plain malevolent. People need to disinvest from this routine and that, and lower the volume of their opinions. More humility and less contentiousness, Hess advises, and more experimentation and less stiffness. Most of all, stop trying to solve everything. Look at how often reform has failed before.

Indeed, the long-term perspective is the first step in the process, and so Hess devotes much of the book to setting current cruxes in the shadow of history. We argue over vocational vs. academic curricula, but the ancients did, too (Sophists vs. the Socratics). We complain about the costs of textbooks and ponder other methods of delivery; in the Middle Ages, students rented manuscripts directly from the authors! We consider summer vacation a fact of nature, but in the 1840s the school year in northeastern cities lasted more than 240 days. Some of Hess’s remembrances produce ironic results:

•Reformers pushed for smaller schools a few years back to improve instruction and deepen the curriculum, but 100 years ago reformers created large schools for precisely the same reasons.

•Reformers continue to develop new “dispositions” in teacher certification on grounds of diversity and multiculturalism, but reformers devised dispositions long ago on grounds of emotional and physical vitality. The latter look ridiculous today, so what makes the former not potentially ridiculous a few years hence?

•Reformers aim to curtail school boards in order to make administration more efficient (or less dysfunctional in the case of some boards), but, as with school size, reformers created school boards 100 or so years ago for precisely the same reasons.

•Policymakers often defend public schools as more democratic and diverse than private schools, but in the past public schools served as a restrictive mode of socialization — for instance, when they were advocated as a bulwark against private Catholic schooling.

These cases advance because of forgetfulness, which in turn licenses a damaging form of certitude and conceit. People proceed without recognizing that “there are no permanent solutions in schooling” and that ideas announced today have been announced before with equal fanfare. A little more background might temper their claims. “History humbles,” Hess declares.

More institutional memory will advance the debate, too, “emancipating” (a favorite term here) reform from unreasonable expectations, overdone claims of novelty, and us versus them groupings. With a sober awareness of past disappointments, we can bore down into existing structures and envision new, genuinely new, ways of education, “rethinking the structure of schooling.” One example is the School of One program in New York City in which the old model of one teacher handling 25 students at once in one classroom is broken up into a new model of each student being assigned each day to a large class, a tutor, a computer simulation, or a small group, whatever works best at that moment, until the student meets the learning objective. Another idea Hess floats is to break up the monopoly of school boards by nationalizing the services boards provide, so that an effective approach or policy could be imported from one state to another without going through the costly bureaucracy of the importer. Still another is to transfer the sites of teacher certification from universities to K–12 schools on a hands-on apprenticeship model.

Of course, the interests against such innovations are strong (where would all the ed school profs go?), and pathologies inevitably form defenses against the designs that would cure them. This past October, Hess wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News on the end of Michelle Rhee’s three-year run as D.C. schools chancellor. Rhee and Mayor Adrian Fenty began with the rational expectation that “if they could deliver impressive academic results in the first couple of years, their critics would melt away.” Scores did rise significantly, but “the criticism and conflict only built.” At the end, only 30 percent of the African American community in D.C. supported Rhee.

As for Hess’s sober and sensible calls for muting the rhetoric of policy debates, it’s hard to feel much optimism. In the Fall 2010 issue of UCEA Review (available at the University Council for Educational Administration web site), former UCEA president and UNC-Chapel Hill professor Fenwick W. English has an essay titled “The 10 Most Wanted Enemies of American Public Education’s School Leadership.” Scroll down to the list at the end of the article and there he is at number 5: Frederick M. Hess.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

The main finding from the 2008 Survey was a five percent decline in arts participation by Americans.  The percentage of American adults who participated in one way or another in one of the “benchmark” arts activities in the preceding 12 months fell from 39.4 percent in 2002 to 34.6 percent in 2008.

The new report on arts education takes the participation findings from the 2008 report and connects them to other findings regarding arts education.  The Arts Endowment asked researchers at, respectively, the University of Pennsylvania, WolfBrown, and the National Opinion Research Center to analyze the results and draw conclusions about the two areas.  Here is what they said, in the words of Sunil Iyengar, head of the research office at the Endowment:

In their analysis, NORC researchers Nick Rabkin and Eric Hedberg test and ultimately confirm the validity of an assumption made with prior SPPA data, that participation in arts lessons and classes is the most significant predictor of arts participation later in life, even after controlling for other variables.

Plus:

Working along quite different lines, Mark Stern similarly concludes that arts education is the most important known factor in influencing arts participation trends.

This is an important finding for every museum, symphony hall, gallery space, and theater that wishes to boost attendance and support.  It is also crucial for mayors and other local politicians who want to raise the cultural environment of their towns and cities.  If you do not bolster arts education classes in K-12 schools, your arts organizations will continue to lose audience.  Arts course work for Americans at age 10 promotes arts attendance at age 30.

Immediate financial problems demand faster solutions, of course.  It’s hard to think ahead when next year’s budget looks catastrophic.  But if arts organizations wish to survive in the long run, and if political leaders want to take pride in their communities, then they must speak out in support of music, dance, theater, and visual arts in schools nearby.   We remember ancient Athens not only for its democracy and its military.  We also remember it for its drama festivals, which gave the world Sophocles et al.

-Mark Bauerlein

“The idea is to bring classic works of fiction to the online masses by using humorous, irreverent shorts that still manage to present the plot, characters and themes to the viewer,” says Joseph Castelo of Coalition Films.  Burnett identifies yet another benefit: “We want to use comedy in these videos to help kids remember key points and maybe inspire them to actually read the books, too.”

What to say?  Comedy to render Macbeth and The Scarlet Letter, and irreverence, too?  The complexities of Huckleberry Finn in five minutes, including plot, characters and themes?  And the idea that these videos will be a gateway to actually reading the originals . . . well, the notion has been floated a thousand times before and I know of no scientific evidence of its effectiveness.  The remarkable thing about this story isn’t that a media corporation has a plan to tap a homework habit to boost traffic on its web sites.  It is that the leaders of the initiative can dress it up in education-speak and keep a straight face.

-Mark Bauerlein

The researchers aimed to identify “brand equity” among the young, that is, a brand’s overall strength as judged ”by a calculation of Familiarity, Quality, and Purchase Consideration.”  Respondents were asked to rate between 98 and 125 popular brands of goods, relaying how well they know them, how high is their quality, and would they buy them.

For 8-12 year olds, the findings aren’t surprising.  It’s all entertainment and junk food:

1. Nintendo Wii
2. Doritos
3. Oreo’s
4. M&Ms
5. Disney Channel
6. Nickelodeon
7. Nintendo DS
8. McDonald’s
9. Toys R Us
10. Cartoon Network

Lots of screen time here, all for play and diversion.  At least Nintendo gets them off the couch and burns some of those Oreo’s calories.

For the next age group, 13-17 year olds, a different screen time emerges, along with a drop in junk food (although one of them still tops the list).

1. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups
2. iPod
3. Google
4. M&Ms
5. Oreo’s
6. Subway
7. Hershey’s Milk Chocolate
8. Target
9. Sprite
10. Microsoft

Note the appearance of Google at Number 3.  It isn’t something you buy or eat or watch, really.  It’s not a show or a TV channel, and you don’t shop for it in a store.  It’s something you do.

Most importantly for teachers, Google is a central learning resource in and out of the classroom.  For their homework, especially research assignments, students go to Google their as a first resort.  Is this the first time ever that young people have given brand loyalty to a tool so much a part of their schoolwork?

The significance grows in the next age group, 18-24 year olds, where Google rises to Number 1 and is followed by another tool often used by teachers for instructional purposes.

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. iPod
4. Gatorade
5. Target
6. Subway
7. Apple
8. iTunes
9. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups
10.Oreo’s

Once again, as far as I know, no other brand has ever proven so popular in both work and play, or adjusts so smoothly from school hours to leisure hours and back again.

This is an advantage in that teachers can coax students to conduct inquiries using a tool that they already love, as opposed to those clunky old World Book Encyclopedias in the library.  But it is a disadvantage in that Google in the classroom (and Facebook, too, for those teachers who implement them) carries with it a set of habits and expectations that students have built around them in out-of-school hours.

When students consulted library books and resources to complete their homework, diversions stopped.  They couldn’t use the books to communicate with buddies or download music.  The books were for one thing–learning.  Work and play didn’t meld.

Now they do.  This is worse than the old problem of students doing homework with the television on, books open and papers spread out while Friends unfolds across the room.  The older way is a form of multi-tasking, yes, an ineffectual one.  The newer one, though, is multi-tasking of a different kind.  With the laptop and Google, Facebook, etc., in action, multi-tasking of work and play takes place with the same instrument.

The new challenge, then, is this: with Google so popular and trusted and beloved, can teachers reduce the idle and distracting behaviors of the service and increase the intellectual behaviors of it?

- Mark Bauerlein

Listen to the Excerpt

At SUNY-Albany, for instance, in response to a huge budget shortfall, President George Philip announced in an email sent out to the university in late September, “As a first step in this more difficult phase of reallocation planning, I have issued a directive today to suspend all new admissions to five program areas – Classics, French, Italian, Russian, and Theatre.”

A few days later, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that LSU planned to lay off 14 foreign language instructors (that is, non-tenured teachers) at the end of Fall semester.   It’s another case of cutting costs in a difficult budget year.  Furthermore, LSU has decided to end its German and Latin majors.

And a few days ago, the University of Minnesota released a committee report on cuts and downsizing for the College of Liberal Arts.  The report doesn’t specify in much detail precisely what will happen to foreign language departments, but one paragraph is ominous:

The only major areas of funding left to consider are graduate teaching assistants and professional teaching staff; together these make up about $34 million in FY2011. Professional (P/A) teaching staff instruct roughly 1,000 courses each year in CLA at an average cost of a bit under $8,000 per course. These dedicated professionals teach in many departments, but they are concentrated in freshman writing, foreign languages, journalism, communication, and the fine arts. Willy Sutton said that he robbed banks because, ‘That’s where the money is.’ If CLA is forced to take another large cut, much of it will be coming from these two categories, because that’s where the money is.”

Finally, I’ve heard from people working in foreign languages at the Modern Language Association that anecdotal evidence of cuts continues to trickle in.  Full professors retire and are replaced by adjuncts.  Graduate student lines are reduced.  Administrators are planning to consolidate departments into super-departments.  And so on.

This is why the news this week from College Board is heartening.  Two years ago, the College Board stated that it would end AP Italian Language and Culture, claiming that it needed “external funders” to come forward if the program would survive.  The program did end, but on Nov 10 the College board announced that it would bring the AP Italian test back, with the next administration to take place in May 2012.

This is a crucial development for higher education.  Foreign language programs make for an easy target to cost-cutters for one reason: low undergraduate enrollments.  At SUNY-Albany, the president noted, the five programs being cut claimed only 300 majors in all.  Without undergraduate demand, administrators can’t keep those programs off the block.  The prestige that comes with having full-scale foreign language departments simply doesn’t off-set the cost of running them.  If you have six tenured professors in a department making $75,000 a year, but only 15 majors in that department, it looks like a boutique offering, and colleges just can’t afford it.

To boost enrollments, you need a pipeline, including appealing freshman courses and, precisely, an AP program that draws teenagers in before they even arrive in college.  People major in foreign languages usually because they had a great experience in a foreign language class before age 20.  Italian professors all across the country should salute the College Board and the advocates who pressed for reviving the course, including Dr. Margaret Cuomo, the Italian Language Foundation, and the Italian Government.

–Mark Bauerlein

That’s the conclusion of an important study of teaching practices and text selections by Sandy Stotsky with Joan Traffas and James Woodworth.  The study appears here (PDF) and is published as an issue of Forum: A Publication of the ALSCW (Spring 2010) under the title “Literary Study in Grades 9, 10, and 11: A National Survey.”  With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Bradley Foundation, Stotsky and her team gathered a representative sample of more than 400 English teachers and administered a 67-question survey instrument.

The survey explored the texts they assign, the balance of literary and informational texts, the popularity of certain classroom practices, and, as noted above, the preferred methods of interpreting the works.  When teachers were asked which approaches “might best describe your approach to literary reading and study,” the numbers broke down as follows (respondents could provide more than one answer):

Click to enlarge

To understand these results, we need to distinguish what these approaches entail.  “Reader response” can cover anything that emphasizes a student’s personal experience of the work, not just impressionistic questions such as “In what ways did this work speak to you?” but also more substantive ones such as “How does your background enable you to understand (or misunderstand) elements of this work?”

“Biographical or Historical” covers methods in which biographical or historical materials are brought to bear upon the text.  These might include, for instance, explaining the settings of John Updike’s “Rabbit” novels by way of the mid-century realities of Reading, Pennsylvania, and environs.  One might discuss To Kill a Mockingbird only after presenting Jim Crow mores in the early-20th-century South.

“Multicultural” approaches would emphasize themes of racial, ethnic, regional, and sexual identity and cultures.

Finally, “Close Reading or New Criticism” would emphasize the formal analysis of figurative language, plot, structure, imagery, and irony.

The chart above places formal analysis well behind reader response and biographical/historical approaches.  This is a damaging trend, one that shows a reduction in analytical methods since the last major study of the subject by Arthur Applebee in 1993.  Back then, 50 percent of teachers stressed close reading in the classroom.  Today, it’s a tertiary preference.

Here is the danger.  Without focused training in deep analysis of literary and non-literary texts, students enter college un-ready for its reading demands.  Students generally can complete low-grade analytical tasks such as identifying a thesis, charting evidence at different points in an argument, and discovering various biases.  But college level assignments ask for more.  Students must handle multi-layered statements with shifting undertones and overtones.  They must pick up implicit and explicit allusions.  They must expand their vocabulary and distinguish metaphors and ironies and other verbal subtleties.

Those capacities come not from contextualist orientations (although “outside” information helps), but from slow, deliberate textual analysis.  The more teachers slip away from it, the more remediation we may expect to see on college campuses, a problem already burdening colleges with developing capacities that should have been acquired years earlier.  Indeed, when ACT pored over college-readiness data from 2005, it found that “the clearest differentiator in reading between students who are college ready and students who are not is the ability to comprehend complex texts.”  More reader response exercises for 9th-11th-graders are only going to exacerbate the problem.

That’s the contention of Connie Yowell, Director of Education Grantmaking at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in a piece at the Huffington Post last week.

Here are the four ways:

“1) They can pursue interest-driven learning at a tantalizing pace and to fascinating degrees;
2) They readily collaborate and learn from their peers, across geography and cultures;
3) They are participating and producing in learning, skill-building, and knowledge-sharing, as opposed to just being receptacles for information;
4) They can communicate directly with knowledge-giving institutions and individuals all over the world.”

Yowell gives examples.  She notes that

“a student in the Gulf can produce a video or a blog on the environmental crisis there, and publish it to the Internet for the world to see.  A classroom of students in Ohio studying apartheid can use Skype to have a video conversation with a classroom of students in South Africa.  A youth in Iran can post a blog or use social networking to talk about the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution of 2009 and receive encouraging messages from students all over the world.”

Yowell offers these observations as patent facts.  Her real contention is that schools have failed to keep up with the innovative learning strategies of digital natives.  Our schools have “proven highly resistant to change, when it comes to technology and learning,” she claims.  Among other things, they are still stuck on the idea of the teacher as “the anointed expert in the classroom.”  Indeed, the whole system remains “rooted in late 19^th century ideals mostly driven by industrialization” which “treats children and students as a massive group.”  The digital environment, on the other hand, “maximizes individual talents.”

Of course, one could charge Yowell with cherry-picking a few rare instances of young people using digital media for extraordinary intellectual purposes, or with idealizing social networks well beyond their reality.  One could also ask why, with so much brilliance happening in digital spaces, we don’t seem to see any impact on test scores.  One could also ask how, when asked to study mid-20^th-century anti-communism, digital tools improve upon a student at a desk poring page-by-page over Witness (Whittaker Chambers), issues of Partisan Review, and The Road to Serfdom (Hayek).

But what stands out in this rendition of recent digital breakthroughs in learning is that it relies on some of the most routine progressivist assumptions about learning.  Here we have century-old child-centered premises at the root of the techno-pedagogy vision, premises that displace the authority of the teacher and individualize instruction.  That’s what Yowell finds most distinctive about digital learning: its empowerment of the students, its conversion of them from ‘receptacles of information’ into ‘participants’ in and ’producers’ of the flow of knowledge.  It’s a strange connection between 21^st-century technology and early-20^th-century education ideas.  Perhaps Yowell does not realize that the 19^th-century model she disparages is only a couple decades older than the model she acclaims.

My take on how and why this approach fails appears in this issue of Education Next. It recounts one case of “social outcomes” strategy that arose at a meeting of the Arts Education Partnership, and it then describes the innovative programs developed by former-chairman Dana Gioia that operated on a different strategy—with great success.

Recently I surveyed further efforts by arts educators to explain and advance their field by social outcomes and came across an even more extreme outlook at the center of the field. It was the design of the 2010 convention of the National Art Education Association along the lines of the theme “Art Education and Social Justice.” The Association created an in-your-face logo for the gathering, a black fist grasping two paint brushes and linking social protest with artistic creation. To explain the theme, the NAEA added a page to its web site with the heading “What does the 2010 NAEA National Convention theme ‘Art Education and Social Justice’ mean, and why was it selected?” The program coordinator composed it, and it lays out in bold phrases the openly and proudly activist nature of the event.

We start with a quotation from Brazilian Marxist educator Paolo Freire, who declares, “Education is always political.” The paragraph to follow bears a title from Freire’s corpus, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” and provides an abstract clarification:

. . . the term social justice alludes to the notion of education as a political act, and when coupled with the term art education hints at models of resistance—teaching as a form of activism.

Next comes a bullet-point list of things that Art Education and Social Justice “questions,” including “American democracy,” “race,” “traditional means of knowledge production,” “passivity,” “ignorance,” “difference as being divisive,” and “truths.” Then we have a list of things Art Education and Social Justice “embraces,” including “democracy,” “equity,” “race,” “sexuality,” “history,” “imagination,” and “more possibilities.”

Two paragraphs follow on the election of Barack Obama and a May 2009 White House briefing on “Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery.”

Finally, after the sententious assertion “It is never a comfortable task to question oneself,” the announcement quotes Maxine Greene: “[T]he arts will help disrupt the walls that obscure . . . spheres of freedom.”

What is one to say? The NAEA doesn’t propose the relation of arts education to politics and social justice as a question to be explored and debated. Art education is political, period, and it should advocate for social justice. The only issue on the NAEA table is how to do so. The approach commences so far from a non-activist understanding of the study of art, which most people assume, that it forbids any consideration of art education as not political. If a layperson were to comment, “But I don’t see how teaching portrait drawing or Mozart’s Figaro is political at all,” the NAEA could only shake its head and think, “They just don’t get it.” Indeed, it presses so righteously on the activist essence of art instruction that someone who disputes it falls quickly into the camp of benighted bearers of false consciousness or of tactical oppressors of the people.

The political conception is so hardened that it begs a simple question: Where is the art?

Note that in the list of items “questioned” and “embraced” by Art Education and Social Justice, we have no artistic terms. No beauty, no taste, no craft or technique, no criticism or theory, no form or genre, no ancient or Medieval or Renaissance or Romantic or Modern or Postmodern, no abstract or primitive or conceptual or minimal, no perspective or iconography, no paintbrushes or printing or chisels or cameras.  Instead, they pile up on identity and politics, plus a few meaningless abstractions (“truths,” “not knowing”). It’s a perverse situation.  The very institution organized to foster arts education ends up deleting art from its advocacy, substituting social outcomes for knowledge and skills in the disciplines.

Perhaps leaders of the NAEA push an activist agenda not because they want arts teachers to become activists themselves, but because they believe that high-sounding epithets such as “social justice” and noble visions of “equity” will advance the cause of arts education. If so, they betray their own parochialism, for only people who already share the same activist motives will heed this call. For everyone else, reactions will range from “Are you kidding?” to “Get these proselytizers away from the classroom!”

The unpopularity of arts ed activism stems not only from ideological narrowness, but more importantly from its failure to recognize a basic truth. People like art for another reason.  Nearly 200 years ago, the German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel outlined it succinctly in his Philosophy of Fine Art:

. . . what we enjoy in the beauty of art is precisely the freedom of its productive and plastic energy. In the origination, as in the contemplation, of its creation, we appear to escape wholly from the fetters of rule and regularity.

Art objects give pleasure because they seem to rise above the normal demands and circumstances of life. If you walk into a Hard Rock Café, you’ll find mounted on the wall a shiny, elaborate grill from a 1950s automobile. There, it’s enjoyed as art.  The same object on a car parked on the street is different. It’s too implicated in how the car runs, how much the car is worth, who owns it, and whether it will get a ticket to be contemplated independently. In the Hard Rock Café, those circumstances don’t matter. That’s why Hegel calls art “free.”  It is detached from practical concerns, and so can be perceived independently, imagined apart from “rule and regularity.” To take other examples: people can relish murder mysteries without the reality of killing; they can watch suffering in a tragedy and still savor the presentation; they can observe evil characters in a film plotting horrible deeds and be hooked; a medieval painting of the tortures in Hell can draw tourists in droves.

As soon as art becomes tied down to any practical end or use, its appeal slips. Hence the distaste laypersons feel when activists bind art to social and political aims. The mandate constrains the aesthetic experience, weighs down the pleasure with a sanctioned goal. It sparks not the free exercise of imagination but the pre-set burden of conscience. If NAEA officers wish to expand courses in elementary and secondary schools, this is not the way to proceed. Math and science teachers don’t want a political preacher in the next classroom. Administrators don’t want to deal with the inevitable controversies that will arise (an angry conservative parent, a news story on political correctness in a local middle school, etc.). And finally, art lovers don’t like the atmosphere of the politically-oriented classroom, and their objection may be the most imposing: “You’re killing the joy!”

Every chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts must advocate for arts education. The arts need a voice in power, say people in the field, someone in the corridors of influence to argue the benefits of teaching the nation’s students about classical and jazz music, ballet, and sculpture. With No Child Left Behind (NCLB) emphasizing math and reading, business and manufacturing leaders calling for workplace readiness in our graduates, and politicians citing lagging international competitiveness in science and math, the Arts Endowment chairman must utilize the bully pulpit more than ever before. Dance, music, theater, and visual arts show up ever further down the priority ladder, and arts educators feel that they must fight to maintain even a toehold in the curriculum. The Arts Endowment chairman, they insist, must help.

It is no surprise, then, that in a November 2009 profile in the Wall Street Journal, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts Rocco Landesman offers pointed remarks when arts education comes up. Examine closely what he singles out about the field:

When [Landesman] starts talking about his ideas for integrating the arts in education, his rhetoric becomes less bipartisan: “We’re going to try to move forward all the kids who were left behind by ‘No Child Left Behind’—the kids who have talent or a passion or an idiosyncratic perspective. Those kids are important too and they should have a place in society. It’s very often the arts that catches them.”

The emphasis falls on the unusual student, the difficult kid, not on the arts as a subject for study. Landesman doesn’t defend arts education as a rigorous discipline that builds concentration and requires practice, practice, practice. Nor does he say, We need arts education to keep alive the legacy of American art—Thomas Cole, Martha Graham, Duke Ellington… He doesn’t highlight the provocative stuff with something like, We need arts education to train young people to comprehend innovative, boundary-breaking art. Instead, the purpose is salvation. Some students don’t fit the NCLB regime and other subjects don’t inspire them. Talented but offbeat, they sulk through algebra, act up in the cafeteria, and drop out of school. The arts “catch” them and pull them back, turning a sinking ego on the margins into a creative citizen with “a place in society.”

Saving Kids with Art

To educators outside the arts field, it sounds like an odd approach to a school subject. If you want to advocate a field, you have to justify it as a discipline. It has to form a body of knowledge and skills that students study at least partly for its own sake. In the case of the arts, a graduated curriculum would incorporate technical skills and art history and theory, just as English language arts integrate literacy skills and the lineages of English, American, and world literatures. Yes, arts learning may have social and moral and professional benefits, but if people don’t value the materials of the fields themselves—if they can’t say that if High School X doesn’t acquaint students with Renaissance painting, classical music, and modern dance, its graduates will be undereducated—then arts educators lose in the competition for funds and hours in the day. Arts education remains an extracurricular, and school administrators focused on math and reading can push it aside: The arts are fine, so let kids who are interested in them study in an afterschool program like band practice.

The arts-saves-kids rationale crops up frequently near the centers of political power. I heard it repeated time and again while working on arts education policy at the Arts Endowment from 2003 to 2005. In gatherings such as the thrice-yearly meetings hosted by the Arts Education Partnership (AEP), a venture funded by the Arts Endowment and the U.S. Department of Education, arts education directors at state arts councils, officers at foundations, community arts school leaders, and various education-school professors outlined programs and research that related arts in classrooms directly to students in classrooms, especially to low-income, minority, at-risk, and underserved populations. Participants tended not to be classroom teachers, but to come from a network of public agencies, nonprofits, and academic centers, such as the Arts in Education Program at Harvard University. Their job was promotion, not instruction, their audience funders and politicians and school administrators, not students. They didn’t talk much about the arts canon (Shakespeare, Beethoven, etc.) or the interpretation of forms and contents (how to understand ancient tragedy, modern dance, etc.). Nor did they offer practical strategies for teachers and administrators who want to maintain the arts but face budget cuts and faceless bureaucracies. Instead, they talked about where to find money, how to build alliances, react to new policies, and firm up political support. And their preferred mode of vindication was to cast arts education as an agent of social change and individual transformation. As Dick Deasy, director of the Partnership (who retired in 2008), liked to say, “Teachers don’t teach a subject—they teach kids.”

In 2004, for instance, the Arts Endowment sponsored a summer institute organized by the Ohio Arts Council in Dayton. The stated aim was to bring educators from around the state together to hear about ways of strengthening arts curricula in schools. The headline speaker the first day was Harvard professor Jessica Hoffman Davis, who gave a rousing summary of what arts learning does for kids, stating at one point that the arts, among other things, allow schools to get away from letter grades. In the breakout sessions, participants had a common reply: “That was great, but we already believe in the arts. We need to find more classrooms, more resources, more money!”

In such discussions, the social dimension, the salvation purpose, overrode more mundane concerns. In a plenary session of the September 2003 AEP forum at Lincoln Center in New York, Kurt Wootton of Brown University offered a representative vignette in histrionic detail. After asking everybody in the room to say hello to people sitting nearby and to explain why they were there, he illustrated why the arts are “uniquely positioned to create social opportunities for learning.” (The address is reproduced on AEP’s web site in You Want to Be a Part of Everything: The Arts, Community, and Learning.) His proof came in the form of the story of Carlos, “a real gangster.” According to one of his teachers, Carlos was “the bad boy of the neighborhood,” a tough kid who “didn’t take s— from anyone.” He spent his first two years of high school on suspension, in detention, and now and then in class. Teachers dreaded his presence and administrators threw up their hands.

But in English class, something special happened. Carlos read at a 5th-grade level, but in discussions of Othello and Of Mice and Men, “he always had something interesting, and more often comical, to add to the class.” As the year progressed, his commitment did, too. With the help of a visiting theater artist, the students began to design and rehearse a pastiche of scenes from works they had read along with accounts from their own lives. The year would culminate in a schoolwide performance.

After three weeks of rehearsals, the teacher realized, Carlos had not missed a single session. Amazing, but even more so was what the teacher noticed later that day on the school’s daily attendance sheet. At the top of the “out of school suspension” list stood Carlos’s name! He had been kicked out of school for 10 days and had already served 7. And yet, his theater attendance was perfect. Carlos was sneaking back into school for theater.

When Wootten finished Carlos’s story, the room erupted in applause. It had all the ingredients of arts education advocacy and some enticing rebelliousness as well: a caring teacher who doesn’t give up on sliding students, a bad kid with a heart and a brain, a visiting artist in a tough school, and a minority group member defying administrative powers for love of theater.

One can appreciate the motivation that theater inspired in the young man, but the story had some dark undertones unrecognized in the speech. I asked one man who had to deal often with school administrators about what a principal would say. He shook his head and replied, “If a principal suspended a student, he did so for a pretty good reason, and if he knew that the kid was sneaking back onto the grounds, he’d be furious.”

One could hardly imagine the story stirring teachers in other fields, either, for it didn’t validate the arts as an academic discipline. A history teacher might respond, “You think the arts are more ‘motivational’ than history?” A math teacher might say, “Getting an ‘A’ on an algebra final raises self-esteem just as much as doing a self-portrait in art class.” If arts advocates instead emphasize the material—Shakespeare, major and minor chords, etc.—other teachers might show respect for their position, even if only to avoid appearing anti-art or anti-intellectual.

But such tactics don’t obtain at AEP or similar meetings. Turnaround tales and the like carry too much emotional freight to be displaced by talk of art history. Perhaps those engaged in arts ed lobbying believe that class- and race-based melodramas best sway elected officials and philanthropic organizations. Or perhaps they genuinely find the social and personal benefits of arts instruction more compelling than the arts themselves.

Arts as Discipline

When Dana Gioia took control of the Arts Endowment in January 2003, he didn’t share the arts-as-salvation outlook. One of the first things he told his education staff was of his preference for the Core Knowledge curriculum. While he believed that arts education enriches young people’s minds and transforms their lives, he felt that arts education had the strongest impact when students encountered lasting works of force and beauty. Students needed to experience great art—classic and contemporary—to acquire a solid foundation for their own general education and creativity. Otherwise, arts education would remain a sidelight in the curriculum, marginal and ineffective. How to impart the importance of artistic tradition without estranging arts ed advocates?

Gioia launched two reforms. First, he asked David Steiner, whom he hired to direct the Office of Arts Education, and me to review grant guidelines and suggest ways to strengthen their content requirements. We came up with a simple, but far-reaching stipulation: applicants for arts education grants had to align their programs with national or state standards and evaluate student learning by them. Awards to “Learning in the Arts for Children and Youth” must “apply national or state arts education standards,” we insisted, and “Students will be assessed according to national or state arts education standards.”

This created a challenge for arts organizations applying for Arts Endowment awards. Many of them had evaluation plans already in place, but those usually amounted to questionnaires issued to students at the end of the program that measured their attitudes and enjoyment. Or, they involved observations by evaluators who measured participation—for instance, how many kids talked in class. They did not focus on learning outcomes. From now on, they’d have to.

Arts advocates didn’t protest the change, in part because the field had already embraced outcome measures: the National Standards for Arts Education. The project was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Endowment for the Humanities; a consortium of arts teacher organizations developed comprehensive standards for dance, theater, music, and the visual arts. Significantly, the designers weren’t primarily engaged in advocacy and fundraising. The final version appeared in 1994, and ever since it has garnered solid esteem, even though its premises run against the child-centered dramaturgy described above. Above all, arts educators wanted to establish strong disciplinary standards for their respective fields, both to regularize arts instruction across the country and to win higher recognition for the fields in the overall curriculum. Wisely, the designers insisted on the fundamental place of art history in the document. “In this document,” they wrote, “art means two things: (1) creative works and the process of producing them, and (2) the whole body of work in the art forms that make up the entire human intellectual and cultural heritage.” They define a “good education in the arts” as including “a thorough grounding in a basic body of knowledge.”

Furthermore, the standards “help ensure that the study of the arts is disciplined and well focused,” and that “arts instruction has a point of reference for assessing its results.” Assessments in the document follow not from social and personal impact, but from knowledge and skills. For instance, dance standards for grades 9–12 include this skill test: “Students choreograph a duet demonstrating an understanding of choreographic principles, processes, and structures”; and this content test: “Students create and answer twenty-five questions about dance and dancers prior to the twentieth century.” Music 9–12 includes this one: “Students classify by genre or style and by historical period or culture unfamiliar but representative aural examples of music and explain the reasoning behind their classifications.”

Gioia’s other reform was to develop separate arts education initiatives based squarely on art historical content. These programs were a primary instrument for building congressional consensus on Arts Endowment funding overall:

•  Shakespeare in American Communities—tours by theatrical companies to smaller towns and thousands of schools across the United States to give performances of Shakespeare plays and run workshops for students. The program included a toolkit for English and theater teachers that contained educational materials; by 2008, the toolkit had been delivered to teachers of more than 24 million students.

•  American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius—a multidimensional program providing, among other things, educational materials to schools on the high-culture heritage of American art.

•  Poetry Out Loud—modeled on the National Spelling Bee, a competition at the school, state, and national levels for high-school students, who memorize and recite a poem selected from a list of works both contemporary and classic, John Donne to Allen Ginsberg. Winners receive college scholarships and cash prizes for their schools’ libraries. In 2008, 250,000 students participated, and media coverage included a front-page story in USA Today and a segment on CBS News Sunday Morning.

The content of art and artistic tradition was at the center of each initiative. When Gioia first unveiled Poetry Out Loud, some state arts officers protested because it didn’t allow students to present their own compositions. Gioia’s reply was, in effect, “That isn’t what the competition is about.” With this particular effort, he wanted to encourage more reading of great poems, not more writing of adolescent verse.

Other figures in the arts education network considered Gioia’s programs tame and conservative, a Bush administration retreat from edgy and provocative art. On PBS NewsHour, for instance, after Gioia cited the Shakespeare initiative, interviewer Jeffrey Brown remarked, “Of course, for some people, though, this is the essence of ‘safe.’ Shakespeare? Who’s against Shakespeare?”

Gioia’s sage reply hinted at the social benefits of art while still honoring the art itself: “I could come up with 100 adjectives for Shakespeare before ‘safe’ would be the one I would offer [Regan and Goneril safe? The climax of Hamlet?]…. I was in a production in New York and we had all these New York insider theater people as half the audience and then in came 50 kids from the South Bronx. They were seeing Richard III. This production alarmed, excited. It was provocative. It wasn’t safe. It opened up possibilities in life and imagination to these kids that they weren’t getting otherwise.”

It helped, too, that the initiative gave 2,000 actors in 77 theater companies employment, and that Gioia was able to fund the Shakespeare project without taking any funds away from existing theater grant categories. Moreover, the Arts Endowment’s allocation from Congress grew steadily, jumping $20 million from 2007 to 2008 alone. Even if they bristled at the high-art, standards-based nature of Gioia’s approach, arts education advocates had to appreciate the resources he steered their way.

Beyond the Divide

For all the talk about why the arts are important and how they must be funded, the most successful support tactic I have encountered came from an actor/director in Los Angeles, Pierson Blaetz, co-director of Greenway Arts Alliance. The Greenway Arts Alliance runs a theater on the grounds of Fairfax High School, a large public school in the middle of West Hollywood. Living in the neighborhood during the’90s, Blaetz and co-founder Whitney Weston became interested in bringing more arts to students, but had to figure a way to provide the two necessities, space and money.

The project was an ingenious act of entrepreneurship. Blaetz and Weston surveyed the Fairfax High School campus and saw hidden value. First, they spotted an unused, roomy student social hall that lay separate from the main buildings and could serve as a venue for practice and performances. Second, they noted that the campus had an asset that was not in use on weekends: land. Fairfax High sits on expensive real estate right next to the L.A. Farmers Market. On Saturdays, while locals and tourists flooded the market, Blaetz noticed, acres of Fairfax High sat quiet and empty. What if, they proposed to school administrators, they leased and renovated the student hall and ran a weekend flea market at the school? They would charge a small admission fee, have merchants pay for spaces, let students work it, and pass the proceeds to the school. In return, Fairfax High would integrate Greenway into the curriculum and support its professional activities.

Administrators agreed, and now the Melrose Trading Post opens every Sunday in the Fairfax High parking lot with as many as 4,000 customers browsing some 200 stalls filled with antiques and collectibles. Meanwhile, students take courses at Greenway in drama, dance, and film, including theater classes for low-skilled 9th- and 10th-grade readers. Students also join Greenway in various productions after school, and their weekly Poetry Lounge is one of the most popular slam events in the country. While Greenway’s curriculum emphasizes its work with “at-risk high school students” and the power of the arts to “motivate youth” and impart “essential life skills,” it also aims at “skills, knowledge, and/or understanding of the arts consistent with national and state arts education standards.” In other words, while nodding to the social benefits of the program, Greenway recognizes the bottom line: demonstrated learning of the art, history, and practice of theater itself.

The Greenway Arts Alliance is an obvious model for arts education. Greenway has received support from public agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the City of Los Angeles, but it has staked its continuance year-to-year on private enterprise. The program has thrived for years, and Fairfax High principal Ed Zubiate couldn’t be happier. Money comes in each week, affording the school needed resources, while the Fairfax curriculum expands nicely into the arts. In addition, 15 students have paid employment at the Melrose Trading Post each semester, and adults in the area with no connection to the school visit the grounds to attend performances (thus enhancing the school’s community profile). The relationship is symbiotic, not one of arts educators beseeching a few crumbs and class minutes.

Blaetz says that there are thousands of schools across the country ready for the same kind of creative economizing. A school might run a small farm that teaches students ecology and agriculture—and sells produce on weekends. The strategy transcends arts education and poses a logistical question about all schools. Why are they sitting on underused resources year after year, while scrambling to fund the arts and other programs?

When I shared Blaetz’s story with arts education advocates, not one of them followed up. I mentioned it to several attendees at AEP meetings and received blank glances in return. I’m not sure why, but I can guess. The people I encountered prosecute their mission by appealing directly to federal, state, and local governments and to nonprofit foundations for help. Blaetz went first to the free market. That approach is simply foreign to the network of arts ed folks hovering around public agencies and philanthropic groups.

That’s too bad, because what arts education needs in a time of fiscal crises are fewer advocates and more entrepreneurs.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Charter schools don’t play by union rules. So when Harlem Success Academy, a charter group in New York, proposed to take over P.S. 194’s building after the school was shut down for poor performance, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the New York Civil Liberties Union took the obvious step: they filed a lawsuit claiming that the state pressed forward without proper consultation with local school boards.

Such resistance has dogged the school choice movement for years, producing a fog of politics cleared all too rarely by moments of forthrightness. Clearing some of the fog is The Lottery, a new documentary film by Madeleine Sackler that tracks four families hoping to enroll their kids in one of the Harlem Success charter schools. During the film’s 79 minutes, we watch UFT president Randi Weingarten on the Charlie Rose Show blurt out “No!” to Rose’s assertion that only 10 of 55,000 tenured teachers in the New York City school system were fired the previous year. (The U.S. Dept. of Education counts, precisely, 10.) We witness ACORN workers armed with megaphones fill the sidewalk outside a charter school meeting protesting the very existence of charters in the community. We hear again how the average black 12th grader performs as well as the average white 8th grader. On and on.

These familiar facts and events form a galling and sad backdrop for the real story of the film, parents desperate to find a better school. For them, it means a route away from poverty and despair, even prison. “I just want my daughter to have the best in life,” signs a deaf mother who dropped out of high school to help her grandmother. One father sits in a cell serving 25 to life. Tears in his eyes, he moans that if only someone had entered his life early on and steered him toward college, or had just given him some faith in his own intellect, he wouldn’t be there.

Harlem Success teachers do just that. That’s why so many families show up for lottery day. More than 3,000 individuals apply for admission, but the schools offer only 475 slots. Ponder those odds in light of Weingarten’s explanation to the New York Times for the P.S. 194 lawsuit blocking the expansion of Harlem Success: “Parents should have a voice when it comes to their children’s education, and by eliminating community schools without public hearings, the D.O.E. is taking away that voice.”

There you have the perverse logic of vested interests and power politics in public education. It would be laughable if it didn’t produce actual perversities such as the annual rite of charter school lotteries, which offer pathetically low chances of winning. That’s where The Lottery climaxes and where charter school advocates find their best persuasion. Observe these real people in tough circumstances attending the drawing with futures on the line. A little boy dons a shirt and tie, and his mother notes he looks like Barack Obama. “I feel a lot like him,” he replies. Another child prays to be chosen. Anxious families line up all the way down the block and file inside for the proceedings. New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein tells attendees, “Grow the options and let parents vote with their feet.”

Harlem Success administrators and teachers take the stand and the selection begins. Names roll out—and the heartbreak begins. “If they don’t call your name,” one mother mumbles to her son partway through, “it’s okay.” A father and son stare at the screen where names appear as they are called, their faces growing stony as the minutes pass and spaces run out. At the end, the father mutters, “You’re not in,” then he hesitates. He looks around as if the outcome hasn’t quite registered. “They didn’t call your name.” What else is there to say?

“Maybe my name’s gonna come next time,” the boy says.

“Yeah, next year. Not today. Next year.”

Watch and weep.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

The project dates back to a new $80 million “educational wing” for the school, reported a year earlier in the Globe. Back then, Superintendent James Hayes Jr. declared that “newer technology would be fully integrated into the classroom when the building opens.  With WiFi serving the entire school campus and smartboards in use in the classrooms, Hayes said students would be required to use a laptop in class.

‘To us, it opens a whole new world of instruction, and frankly it’s a world that many of these kids are living in already,’ said Hayes, who has yet to create a laptop policy and has not determined whether it would be the student’s or the district’s responsibility to provide them.”

The policy has now materialized. Parents have been informed that every student must use an Apple MacBook in his and her work. No PCs allowed.  Only MacBooks are compatible with the new network in the school “where wireless computer access will be a key component to learning.”

They cost $900, though, and some parents have rebelled. The school has responded by offering low-income families “free or discounted computers,” while others can lease MacBooks at a monthly rent of $25. The rest can use MacBooks for free during the day while one campus, but they can’t take them home. The school will provide an “on-site Apple tech center” to provide support and troubleshooting and loan computers to students whose laptops need repair. Unfortunately, the school hasn’t found any foundations or donors to underwrite the program, even though the laptop program has been two years in the making.

Whether laptops actually improve academic achievement remains an open question, and whether this program is worth the price remains to be seen. But Beverly High School is helping make an announcement by Apple a few years back as part of a back-to-school campain to promote the MacBook. Take a look at this photo.  It’s a display in an Apple store of five laptops on a white shelf with books on shelves above and below. But the books are fake.  They are mounted on photo flats. When Apple proclaims, “The only books you’ll need,” it means the MacBook.

Edutopia presents its pedagogy as cutting-edge and innovative, and its motto, “What Works in Education,” suggests a hard focus on evidence and feedback and outcomes.  Within the article, though, appears a statement by the former executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, Milton Chen, that sounds more like an a priori principle than an idea derived from experience.  Edutopia has six “Core Principles” which “can be summarized in six words,” says Chen. “‘School life should resemble real life.’”

That’s a sweeping assertion, and it carries within it far-reaching premises about the purpose of school, the relation of classrooms to workplaces and leisure spaces, the relevance of curricula, and the relation of the learning process to the activation of knowledge and skills after graduation.  I’ve shared a podium with Dr. Chen before, and he appears a sober and conscientious educator.  But this firm declaration of what is, in fact, a complex and debatable belief seems contrary to the flexible, free-ranging, “what works” outlook the organization espouses.

Pondiscio reveals the long foreground of the “real life” approach to the classroom (Kilpatrick and Dewey), and it’s worth recalling the irony of progressivist expounders speaking so fervently about not being retrograde and traditional in terms that are 100 years old.

We should add to that observation a simple question: Why?  Why should a classroom be like real life?

Pose the question and two problems arise.

First of all, we presume that “real life” educators don’t want all of real life in the classroom, only chosen elements of it.  The real life of teenagers includes conspicuous consumption, peer pressure, puerile songs, movies, videos, and TV shows, 3,000 text messages per month purveying gossip, bad jokes, and hourly updates on trivial movements and happenings, financial hardships, and sexual confusions.

Real-life educators get around the juvenile and pressing aspects by drawing on the tools and better contents of those happenings, say, by using Facebook in collaborative projects.  Even if we accept the possibility of doing so effectively, though, we must revise the principle, qualifying “real life” by removing its damaging and stultifying elements.  A method of selection must follow, which includes making stern judgments of youth culture, adolescent taste, and the social lives of teens and tweens–precisely what progressivist approaches shy away from.

Second, we must assume that in order to fulfill duties and perform well in post-graduate life, students must complete the same assignments in class that they will have to complete on the job and as responsible citizens.  For instance, because many of the burdens of adulthood involve reading informational texts ranging from the newspaper to business correspondence to voting ballots to scientific reports, the English classroom should raise the portion of informational texts on the syllabus–fewer novels and more op-eds.  Because many will enter workspaces requiring group endeavors, teachers should assign more collaborative projects.

A big assumption here.  It is that the best preparation for doing something is doing it.  The best way to learn to write business correspondence at age 30 is by writing lots of business correspondence a age 17.  But this is to identify the completed product with the tools, the skills and knowledge, needed to do it.  In truth, they are not the same.  The ability to write a careful piece of business correspondence or an abstract of a scientific report is enhanced by a reservoir of vocabulary and an acquaintance with different styles of prose, and much of the vocabulary and many of the styles will never, ever make it into the letter or abstract.  Nonetheless, learning them at age 17 will improve the individual’s ability to write the latter at age 30.

Think of it on the sports analogy.  What sport is mastered simply by playing the sport?  None of them.  To improve in football or baseball or tennis or soccer, you lift weights and stretch daily, even though weightlifting and stretching are not practiced on the playing field.  The principle is simple: at least part of training involves exercises not repeated in the game.  One doesn’t hear football players in the weight room complaining, “Man, why do we have to do any more curls–this isn’t football!”

The “real-life” premise, though, says the same thing.  It repeats the old demand for relevance.  What this premise needs is to become the object of Edutopia’s own core principles, including “Integrated Studies,” which highlights “Creativity, adaptability, critical reasoning.”  Let’s put “School life should resemble real life” under the microscope of “critical reasoning” and see what happens.

I asked her about what she does in the classroom, and she volunteered an interesting trend. The students resist her instruction, she admitted, but over the course of the semester they come around and recognize how important these lessons in social justice really are. For her, the pattern was a sign of how much the students learned, how much their awareness had broadened from Day One to the end of the semester.

What struck me was how certain she was of the process, how confident that the shift from resistance to acceptance was proof of success.  But what if the change in student attitude resulted not from a growth in enlightenment, but rather from a more practical stance? In other words, the teachers-in-training figured out what the professor wanted and supplied it in abundance. With a teacher so eager to have students come around, it wouldn’t be hard for them to pass off a staged commitment as a sincere one.

Who knows? In any case, the professor did not give an ounce of integrity to the initial resistance of the trainees.
A recent article by Dan Willingham does. It appears at Teachers College Record under the title “What Do Students Have Against Social Justice Education?” Willingham begins with the fact of many students resisting social justice education, and cites the professors’ perspective upon it:

“These researchers have interpreted the resistance as self-serving cognition on the part of students. Students are defensive about their own privileged status (Applebaum, 2007) and so are reluctant to discuss it. Or they try to remain silent, so as not to discuss it at all (Case & Hemmings, 2005). Or they try to avoid the topic by claiming that oppression is not really all that bad in American society, or that, at least, it’s better than it used to be (Aveling, 2002; Applebaum, 2007). Some students see discussions of oppression as entailing blame, and they want to remain blameless (Chizhik & Chizhik, 2005).”

In other words, resistance is explained by various psychological motives that originate in the students’ social condition. They tend not to suffer social injustice, and so they don’t or won’t recognize its actual existence and extent, or perhaps they do recognize it and feel guilty about not being a target of it.  Each explanation disallows any objective principle to the resistance.

These explanations prevail in spite of the oft-asserted axiom that teachers should listen to students, take their responses seriously, and avoid the authoritarian posture. How does this contradiction continue?

To Willingham, it survives because educators tend to have a single conception of social justice itself. They align social justice with certain beliefs and values, not realizing that students may bear a notion of social justice based upon different beliefs and values. As he puts it, “It is a very good bet that virtually all professors who teach social justice education courses are political liberals. But not all of their students are.”  So, when students resist social justice education, it is possible they don’t reject social justice per se, but only the version of social justice offered in that particular classroom.

Furthermore, students don’t feel comfortable articulating their resistance precisely because they sense that the professors have one conception of social justice. The course is aimed toward that conception as a learning outcome, not as a theory to be discussed and evaluated.

Their unwillingness to argue over which social justice theories are correct ends up confirming the professors’ monolithic conception.  It makes the students appear to be fleeing the truth–which only makes the professors work harder at imparting it.

A little experiment might change their assumptions.  Try this question. Would any education professor committed to social justice education be willing to admit to the legitimate range of theories the 1970 New York Times Magazine article by Milton Friedman entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits”?

There is, indeed, a wondrous statement on page 31 of the standards that appears under the heading “note on range and content of student reading” which bears the phrase, “Through wide and deep reading of literature and literary nonfiction of steadily increasing sophistication, students gain a reservoir of literary and cultural knowledge, references, and images.”

This is precisely the kind of acknowledgment of cultural literacy that education conservatives and curricular traditionalists of various kinds have been advocating for more than two decades.

Still, I think, another step needs to take place in the next round of revisions.  In a word, the “reservoir of literary and cultural knowledge” needs to shift from “note” status to “college-readiness” status.  In the current document, the note sits on the page right next to the college- and career-readiness standards, but the standards themselves don’t incorporate the cultural literacy thrust. Right now, they are all skill-oriented (decoding and analyzing texts, synthesizing information, and the like). Not one of the ten standards addresses the knowledge students need to handle college course work.

This makes the college-readiness listing incomplete.  For the “reservoir of literary and cultural knowledge, references, and images” is crucial to getting young people into college and keeping them there. When students graduate from high school and head into freshman year in college, they encounter professors and graduate students who teach general and introductory courses in U.S. history, world literature, and so on, many of which are part of general education requirements.  In the course of their instruction, teachers refer to other subjects, facts, ideas, and events as a matter of course.  For example, a freshman composition instructor who has a set of readings from contemporary science fiction might also refer to the scientific method, to the 1960s race to the moon, to the Cold War, to Isaac Newton and Darwin, etc.   These references aren’t formalized into assignments or written into exams. They just fall into the classroom conversation, the general intellectual climate of the course.  They mark an implicit expectation of everyone who works and studies there.  And they mark a division of students: those who recognize them and those who don’t.

It isn’t hard to imagine that students who occupy that class and don’t have the expected cultural literacy begin to feel estranged from the whole shebang.  They may have just as much intelligence and motivation as the kids next to them, but they feel uncertain and disadvantaged.  They might wonder how to build up the knowledge reservoir that the other kids have, but they can’t do so and still keep up with the coursework.  Others acquired them before college, and now that college is here the ones with knowledge deficits don’t even know how to begin.

For this reason, we must plant some knowledge elements into the college-readiness listing.  We shouldn’t expect college teachers to adjust their classroom tactics.  They don’t want to have to explain what the word “Renaissance” means.  They don’t want to have to recount what happened to Julius Caesar each time they mention his name.  They assume a background knowledge that lets them teach their subject in an efficient and rigorous way.  Remember, too, that college professors are remarkably resistant to changing their teaching.  They operate on the principle of inertia, and they think they’re right.

So, we need to add something to the CCR list.  My suggestion is to revise Standard 10 as follows:

Read complex texts independently and proficiently, sustaining concentration and monitoring comprehension in a steady process of increasing sophistication and gaining a reservoir of literary and cultural knowledge, references, and images necessary to handle college course work in the liberal arts.

One of the broadest indicators: “Only one in four employers thinks that two-year and four-year colleges are doing a good job in preparing students for the challenges of a global economy.”

Interestingly, employers didn’t endorse a training-oriented kind of preparation. They preferred “a blend of liberal and applied learning.” Indeed, they emphasized not only skills and knowledge tailored to a specific field, but also “a broad range of skills and knowledge.”

Because of the focus on the “global economy,” on the actual conditions of the downturn and the “more complex” realities of our hyper-connected world, the report speaks of “active learning,” “real-world settings,” “cultural and ethnic diversity,” “the challenges of today’s global economy,” “ethical decision-making,” and “emerging educational practices.” These ideas and terms are common enough in education circles.

But the report tempers them with what is, I think, the key finding in the survey. When Hart presented employers with a list of “learning outcomes,” something else came out firmly at the top. Not “critical thinking,” “cultural diversity,” global awareness,” or “collaborative abilities.” Instead, 89 percent of those surveyed identified the old-fashioned, straightforward, nuts-and-bolts “ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing.” (“Critical thinking and analytical reasoning” came in second at 81 percent.)

That ranking specifies where the worst employee deficit lies. Businesses want employees to write well, period, and they want colleges to teach students to write well.

The message is clear, but there’s a problem. Writing instruction is a slow, labor-intensive process. Much of it has to happen in one-on-one conferences with student and teacher working together to revise a rough draft, discussing and altering verbs, punctuation, syntax . . . Teachers have to participate in the composing-revising process for every student, for each one has different strengths and weaknesses and habits that need to be developed or broken.

What college instructor has the time? Regular faculty at research institutions have research demands that pull them away from freshmen and sophomores and pressure them to minimize out-of-class contact. Adjuncts and other non-tenure-track faculty don’t have the research obligations, but they usually have three or four sections of freshman comp to cover—100 or more students. No way can they give them the tutelage necessary to boost their prose.

Only at small, expensive liberal arts colleges do you have the conditions of manageable class sizes and faculty focus on teaching. They make up a tiny portion of the undergraduate population in the United States.

In other words, employers shouldn’t expect colleges to instill the writing skills employees need. The duty falls on high schools, whether they like it or not and whether it is fair or not. We need young Americans by age 18 to be able to read a scientific study and write a clear, cogent summary of it. They must be able to compose a piece of business correspondence with unambiguous assertions and tight transitions. They need to respect the difference between active and passive verbs, to get their modifiers straight, and to observe the conventions of Standard English.

Those are the middle- and high-school teachers’ jobs. Let’s realize that for all the talk about 21st-century skills, new literacies, global thinking, and diversity, the foundation of contemporary achievement still rests in linear, direct, proper writing.

“CRTC scandal stuns the state”

“Cheating details revealed”

“Atlanta board calls for cheating probe”

“CRTC” stands for “criterion-referenced competency tests,” and they are administered to students in grades 3-8 to gauge learning.  The problem is signaled in the first few paragraphs of one of the stories:

“One a late June day two years ago, two DeKalb County school administrators panicked.  A few dozen of their elementary school students had just finished high-stakes summer retests–exams first taken in spring but not passed.  With just a glance at the answer sheets, Atherton Elementary Principal James Berry and Assistant Principal Doretha Alexander saw they were in trouble.

“We cannot not make AYP,’ Alexander said. Not making AYP, or adequate yearly progress, meant not meeting a required federal benchmark.  These students, all fifth-graders, also faced being held back if they did not pass.

“‘Okay,’ Barry answered.  He pulled a pencil from a cup on Alexander’s desk.  ’I want you to call the answers to me.’  With that, he began to erase the students’ answers.”

That’s one scene, and it occurred a while ago.  But official investigations have enlarged the problem, and the general picture is this: fully 191 schools in the state of Georgia, 10 percent of the total number of elementary and middle schools, are up for investigation for altering test answer sheets, the story reported.

The next day’s story put the count at one in five Georgia public schools.  More than half of those schools had at least one classroom that displayed abnormal numbers of wrong answers changed to right answers.  In one elementary school classroom, 4th-grade math tests showed an average of 27 answers changed from wrong to right (out of 70 total answers).  In one middle school in Atlanta, nearly 90 percent of classrooms came up suspicious.

The extent of the scandal remains to be seen, and its impact is long-term.  What happens to kids whose tests were flagged, but who might have done much of the answer-changing themselves in the course of taking them?  What about the fate of the governor’s proposal to tie teacher pay to student performance (in other words, is this too strong an incentive to cheating)?  Who is going to investigate all the individual cases and measure out relative culpability and punishments?

This is going to take awhile.

That isn’t what happened at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, CA, though. When famed chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse offered to plant a garden in a barren lot next to the school, she envisioned a lot more than a little extra-curricular agri-business for the kids. She wanted the whole curriculum.  As Waters explained to the Los Angeles Times last year, “Now we need a curriculum that’s about ecology and about gastronomy so that we can make sure that children are making the right kinds of decisions for themselves, and for the planet.”

Today MLK Jr. Middle School has a one-acre organic garden and kitchen that serve as a working classroom, and it’s not just an add-on initiative.  Part of the Chez Panisse Foundation, the project has a catchy title, The Edible Classroom, and the home page forthrightly declares the ambition: “Classroom teachers and Edible Schoolyard educators integrate food systems concepts into the core curriculum.” Students work the garden and staff the kitchen and learn other subjects along the way. Another page on the Web site gives an example:

“After months of hard work, we are proud to unveil our new Rainwater Catchment System, with a 6,000 gallon capacity. For every inch of rain, we harvest and store 200 gallons of water, and limit the contamination of our Codornices Creek Watershed and the San Francisco Bay. This hands-on, educational tool is illustrating issues of stormwater runoff, pollution, erosion, and providing a real world application of core mathematical concepts.”

In the kitchen, students “experience culture, history, language, ecology, and mathematics through the preparation of food.” Edible Schoolyard offers lesson plans for teachers—the math one is called “Making Mathematics Delicious,” and 6th-graders studying early humans can make “Neolithic Fruit Salad” using Stone Age tools.

Caitlin Flanagan profiles the initiative in The Atlantic magazine this month, and she, too, recounts the whole-curriculum approach. “In English class students composed recipes,” she says, “in math they measured the garden beds, and in history they ground corn as a way of studying pre-Columbian civilizations.”

It sounds so nice, so inspiring, and who would be bilious enough to argue against teaching young people to love the earth? And who doesn’t appreciate the accomplishment of Alice Waters (even the French honor her)? As Flanagan notes, Waters has received non-stop accolades for her school support—a 1998 Excellent in Education Award from her state’s senator, Barbara Boxer, an Education Heroes Award from the U.S. Dept of Ed, and an exhibit sponsored by the Smithsonian on the National Mall devoted to Edible Schoolyard.

For all the admiration, though, in education only outcomes count. Flanagan again:

“According to the 2009 Federal Accountability Requirements, statewide, more than 39 percent of Latinos are proficient in English and 44 percent in math, but at the King school, those numbers are a dismal 30 percent and 29 percent, respectively. Where do Berkeley’s African American and Hispanic middle-schoolers do well? At a gardenless charter school called Cal Prep, where 92 percent of the students are black or Latino, where the focus is on academic achievement, and where test scores have been rising steadily.”

That explains the title of The Atlantic piece, “Cultivating Failure.” Waters has the momentum of her extraordinary prestige and educational faddishness behind her, and California schools now boast 3,849 gardens. Once again, however, we come to the hard question. How do we know that a garden-based instruction in math and reading works better than the old-fashioned way? On the List of Publications page of www.edibleschoolyard.org appear eight volumes, but not one of them mentions any data on effectiveness, instead providing mostly statements of philosophy and “principles.” To cite an example about as far from Chez Panisse as one can go, “Where’s the BEEF?”

Apart from the immediate aim of steering the core standards in certain directions, the document also offers a vision of English education that strangely downplays the fundamental principle of the project, namely, college and career readiness.  The core standards project wants to create a model that will send high school graduates to college with the equipment to keep them there–a critical ambition given the high dropout rates in two-year and four-year institutions.  But “readiness” only comes up briefly in the NCTE report, and there it is dismissed:

“The standards speak to ‘college and career’ readiness. However, there are important dimensions of education beyond these two domains. Purposes for writing include self-expression; releasing the imagination; creating works of art; developing social networks; engaging in civic discourse; supporting personal and spiritual growth; reflecting on experience; communicating professionally and academically; building relationships with others, including with friends, family, and other like-minded individuals; and engaging in aesthetic experiences. Most important perhaps is education for social and civic participation.

A central purpose of education—and certainly literacy education—has been to create citizens who understand and evaluate complex situations within societies and to influence the democratic process ethically, responsibly, and effectively. Much reading and writing in college centers on the public good, with students frequently asked to produce texts that address various publics, not only other academics.”

That’s about it.  The report authors believe “readiness” is a restrictive premise, and so they highlight all the things that it doesn’t cover.  They insert, also, off-campus elements that we should all recognize–”the public good” and “various publics.”

In a document that speaks elsewhere in altogether high-minded tones about solid research and evidence-based assertions, this take on college activity is remarkably out-of-touch.  Ask professors of sociology, art history, history, French, philosophy, biology, political science, and every other discipline outside of Creative Writing what they want out of student writing and you won’t find anybody who says, “self-expression.”  Nobody values the ability to “develop social networks.”  ”Personal and spiritual growth” doesn’t impress them at grading time.  Indeed, I do not know of any college English teachers except those composition and rhetoric teachers who are caught up in “identity” issues who would agree to this list.

Instead, they’ll reply, “Give me clear sentences and coherent paragraphs.”  They want students to observe rules of grammar and adopt a style adequate to communicating an idea, describing an event, summarizing an argument, or analyzing a thesis.  They want English teachers to improve student grammar and style so that they don’t have to.  They don’t want to fix writing.  That’s an exhaustive, labor-intensive activity, and it takes precious minutes away from course content.  They want to impart their subject and assess students’ knowledge of it.  Self-expression, imagination, relationships . . . they’re all wonderful, but they don’t mean a thing if the verbal mechanics aren’t in place.  (One might add that rhet-comp people who do turn their writing courses into “self-exploration” and “public good” settings are widely disparaged by people across the quad who receive their students a semester later and and have to tell them: “I’m not interested in your identity–just craft a thesis and provide evidence for it.”)

We have, then, competing visions of English in play.  NCTE wants English education to be a broader, more social- and self-cognizant enterprise.  The Core Standards project envisions English education as a narrower training in basic reading and writing skills.  The rest of the disciplines agree with the Core Standards project.  Does NCTE really believe that anybody is going to pay attention to them when they start waxing about “releasing the imagination”?

The Outcomes of the document read like a parody of academic identity politics, but they stand loud and clear in black and white.  They include:

• “Our future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression”
• “Future teachers will recognize & demonstrate understanding of white privilege”
• “Future teachers will understand the importance of cultural identity and develop a positive sense of racial/cultural identity”
• “Future teachers are able to explain how institutional racism works in schools”
• “Our future teachers will be able to construct and articulate a sophisticated and nuanced critical analysis of this story of America, for what it illuminates and what it hides or distorts.  In pursuing this analysis, students will make use of, among other concepts and theories, the following:
  • myth of meritocracy in the United States
  • historical connections between scientific racism, intelligence testing, and assumptions of fixed mental capacity
  • alternative explanations for mobility (and lack of it)
  • history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values
  • history of white racism, with special focus on current colorblind ideology”

Needless to say, this is a conception of education that requires certain ideological commitments.  It doesn’t just try to inform aspiring teachers about American history and society and their complicated racial/sexual/etc. aspects.  No, it asks aspiring teachers to adopt a simmering, resentment-ridden conception of both, and it does so by reaching into their minds and asking them to interrogate who they are and what they feel and how they act.

One of the most troubling aspects of the situation is the op-ed written in defense of the program by the Dean of the College of Education, Jean K. Quam.  It appeared in the Star-Tribune after columnist Katherine Kersten attacked it as anti-American and coercive.  While the Race, Culture, Class, Gender report demanded that future teachers adopt the “white-privilege,” “oppression and marginalization” understanding of American society, Dean Quam cast it this way,

“Kersten’s primary concern is that the initiative addresses the reality of how issues of race, class, culture and gender play out in classrooms and affect student achievement. Her position is that discussion of these issues equates to indoctrination. Our belief is that acknowledging these issues is essential to teacher and student success and that ignoring them will not make them go away.”

Note the verb here, “acknowledging.”  Would anybody believe that the “Outcomes” listed above stop at acknowledgment?  Not at all.  They don’t ask future teachers merely to acknowledge forms of racism and the like.  If they did, they would allow for teachers to ponder the notion of, say, “white privilege” and determine that it plays a negligible role in Minnesota classrooms today.  The Task Force allows no such independent conclusions.  Indeed, one of the “Assessments” of the Outcomes asks students to compose a “self-discovery paper” in which they “identify three of their personal motives (desires, needs) that are potentially beneficial and three that are potentially harmful, and discuss how they might affect their teaching.”  It is hard to imagine a more manipulative exercise.

Here’s another statement of Quam’s, this in response to Kersten’s allegation that the vision of American history is a bilious litany of racism etc.: “We do not take a narrow view of who is an American and who can achieve the dream. We expect and require that teachers of the next half-century take a broad, balanced view of that dream.”

“Broad and balanced.”  Again, who would read the report and believe that the drafters would accept a student who said, “Yes, racism is a part of our history, but it has declined in marvelous ways, and does not have a formative effect on students”?

This is to say that the head of education at the leading teacher-training university in the state has offered a misleading, dishonest version of what is going on behind closed doors on the campus.  We can conclude two things.  One, if Quam genuinely believes that the report allows for multiple understandings of American history and society, then she has spent way too much time among the hot-heated identity politicians on campus, so much so that her judgment is critically distorted.  Or two, if Quam thinks that the report does coerce students into one ideological perspective, then her aim is to provide cover for it, not recognizing that her final responsibility is not to Minnesota ed school professors but to the citizens of the State of Minnesota.

Either way, the episode signifies something rotten in the state of the ed school, and it must be opposed.

NB: In Spring 2007, Ed Next published a history of efforts to adjust teachers attitudes (“Return of the Thought Police,” by Laurie Moses Hines).

If people don’t think they can happen and please most everyone in the field, though, they’re wrong. Many readers of Education Next might be surprised to learn that we’ve had national standards in one field for 15 years.  They are the National Standards for Arts Education, an educational document developed by the Consortium of National Arts Education Associations (with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others).  The Consortium included American Alliance for Theater and Education, Music Educators National Conference, the National Art Education Association (the visual arts), and National Dance Association.

One thing the arts educators wanted to do was establish strong disciplinary standards for their respective fields, both to regularize arts instruction across the country and to win higher respect for the fields in the overall curriculum.  They realized that if arts education involved merely skills and practices, then it would remain an “extra,” something outside the core education of each student.  A skills-only approach would also impoverish the full experience of the arts.

The designers insisted, then, on fundamental recognition of art history in the document.  “In this document,” they wrote, “art means two things: (1) creative works and the process of producing them, and (2) the whole body of work in the art forms that make up the entire human intellectual and cultural heritage.”  They define a “good education in the arts” as including “a thorough grounding in a basic body of knowledge.”

The standards themselves reflect the aim.

Here’s one for Music Grades 9-12:

“Students classify by genre or style and by historical period or culture unfamiliar but representative aural examples of music and explain the reasoning behind their classifications”

And one for Dance 9-12:

“Students create and answer twenty-five questions about dance and dancers prior to the twentieth century”

And one for theater:

“Students research and describe appropriate historical production designs, techniques, and performances from various cultures to assist in making artistic choices for informal and formal theatre, film, television, or electronic media productions”

And one for visual art:

“Students analyze and interpret artworks for relationships among form, context, purposes, and critical models, showing understanding of the work of critics, historians, aestheticians, and artists”

They result has garnered thoroughgoing respect from arts educators ever since.  I’ve heard little grumbling about “loss of local control,” “prescribing a curriculum,” and “lack of diversity,” and other familiar complaints.  The standards have served the states well as they have used them to craft their own arts education standards.  It helped that the project secured endorsements from the beginning from Albert Shanker, Congressman Major Owens, Senator Thad Cochran, Leilani Lattin Duke of the Getty Center, Keith Geiger of the National Education Association, Konrad Matthaei of the United Negro College Fund, Joseph Polisi of The Julliard School, Gordon Ambach of the Council of Chief State School Officers, and many other distinguished figures.

The current project in national standards would do well to follow their example.

The school principal, Jeannette M. DiBella, strolls down the hall and peeks inside a math classroom. All is quiet.  The teacher sits at his desk at the back of the room looking down at his notes. Each students sits at a desk at work on books and papers (they look like 8th or 9th Graders). Everything appears orderly and proper.

DiBella doesn’t move on, though.

“Are they taking a test?” she whispers.

The teacher answers that the students are doing independent study to ensure that they are “ready for the next week.” DiBella begins to wander the rows, asking the teacher with a grin, “Are you sure that’s what they’re doing?”

One student turns to look up at her as she approaches—a sure sign of uncertainty.

“What are you doing?” DiBella asks. She picks up the student’s papers and a textbook. “Uh-uh, uh-uh,” she mutters.  She turns to the teacher a few feet away. “They’re not.”  It’s a Spanish assignment. DiBella steps back to the teacher while the student sighs and leans backward. “If you’re back here and they’re over there, they’re not gonna get it done.” She shifts back to the student, confiscates her Spanish book and papers, and queries, “Is that what you’re supposed to be doing?” The student answers with a glum puff of air and DiBella adds, “Excuse me?”

“No,” the young lady mumbles. She knows she’s in trouble.

DiBella continues her tour, then asks the teacher for some reassurance. “So,  you’re gonna give them 15 minutes to work on it, then you’re gonna start teaching them, going over it with them?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he replies.

“You’ll have to monitor, though,” she insists, “because definitely this level will do that, try to do a different assignment.” She shakes her head, holds up the Spanish book, and saunters out, but not before stating, “This is not acceptable. I don’t know what your consequences is [sic], but she’ll have a zero for this assignment.”

DiBella heads down the hallway explaining that the student gets no credit for the Spanish assignment and only half-credit for the math assignment. Next stop, the Spanish classroom.  There, she tells the teacher of the problem, hands her the textbook, and informs her of the zero grade.

It’s an illuminating vignette. Over the years, Providence-St. Mel and its admirable founder Paul J. Adams III have received up and down attention (two visits by President Reagan, a profile in Reader’s Digest, a $1,000,000 donation in 1993 from Oprah Winfrey), it has a 100 percent college acceptance rate, and its ACT scores have risen steadily. But this tiny snapshot of accountability in a math classroom says it all.

The state spends around $55,000 on average for teachers’ salaries at Paterson’s JFK High School. But total per classroom spending in the school runs to $313,268.

Here are classroom spending numbers for other schools:

Keansburg High, Keansburg, $339,592

Asbury Park High, Asbury Park, $346,569

Trenton Central High, Trenton, $366,716

James Ferris High, Jersey City, $398,666

Memorial High, West New York, $417,919

Abington Avenue Middle School, Newark, $436,096

Where does the money go, and why so much?

Perhaps because New Jersey has 616 school districts.  In contrast, Maryland has only 24 school districts.

The average school district in Maryland has 35,000 students.  The average in New Jersey is 2,300 students.   Think about the difference in administrative costs.  While 35,000 students in Maryland have one superintendent and district administrative office, 35,000 students in New Jersey have 15 superintendents and district administrative offices.

Or perhaps because of contractual agreements.  When an Asbury Park superintendent resigned over a “clash of leadership styles,” the school board agreed to pay him a $310,000 severance fee along with $40,000 of his legal costs to go with his $120,750 annual salary.

Or misplaced priorities.  Malcolm X Shabazz High School in Newark devoted $30 million to a new football stadium. In fact, an audit of school spending in low-performing districts in New Jersey concluded that 29 percent of expenditures were not “reasonable.”

Or maybe because many school board elections are not held on presidential election days.

These are some of the bizarre and dismaying facts and stories recounted in a new education documentary entitled The Cartel.

The director is Bob Bowden, a long-time New Jersey journalist and news anchor.  The 90-minute film contains one abomination after another, complete with interviews with whistle-blowers, teachers, politicians, and education officials, including Chester Finn and Paul Peterson.

More material from the film:

Looking at funds pouring into troubled schools, one Trenton councilman sums it up: “The worse we do, the more money we get.”

The Pleasantville district has had 13 superintendents in the past 10 years, and not long ago five school board members were indicted for taking bribes.

A teacher in Camden reports that she was threatened with dismissal if she talked about a school’s policy of changing grades to make the school’s performance look stronger.

An award-winning history teacher in Trenton talks about “ghost-salaries, phantom-salaries, salaries for people who did not exist” on the budget.

Another teacher wanted to start a garden club after school, but union rules wouldn’t let her spend after school hours doing so.

According to a teachers union watchdog group, “The Newark school district has about 3,850 tenured instructional staff. Many of them are hard-working, committed educators. But can it be true that no more than .032% of tenured teachers are unfit to teach school?”

A former-principal estimates that 30-40 percent of his teachers should have been replaced.  When the interviewer tells the head of the New Jersey teachers union that only .03 percent of tenured teachers have been let go, and wonders if the other 99.97 percent are really fully qualified, she answers, “I think 99.97 success rate should be celebrated. That’s something we should be saying, ‘Wow!’”

There is more, much more in the film.  Cronyism and corruption are the themes, inside experience that proof.  It’s an exposé that deserves wide coverage.

BASIS is a charter school that has struggled through neighborhood protests and funding cuts, plus the usual resistance that charter schools face, but its success speaks for itself.  Now, it’s a bragging point for the city, and recently Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton took their show to the school for a lively event.

Compton’s film is partly responsible, but what the leaders of BASIS say in the film runs squarely against some of the soundest convictions in education circles.

Michael and Olga Block, the founders, along with administrator Carolyn McGarvey, are interviewed at length, and what they say about curriculum is worth repeating.  First of all, BASIS found, curriculum was the easy part.  They had a model readily available, the AP roster of courses, and a measure of success, the AP test results for BASIS students.

Yes, they teach to the test.  Olga says, “We thought that those exams will lead us into a good quality program.  So, that was the idea–we will concentrate on the result and we can fill it with whatever we believe would work.”

Standards are high, and content requirements would make many educators shudder.

Starting in 9th Grade, Carolyn says, “They must set a minimum of eight advanced placement courses.”

They have students take the AP Calculus exam in 11th Grade and offer them Game Theory or Differential Equations in 12th Grade.

“In English,” Olga says, “we thought we would go a little deeper in grammar.”

In math, they ask for more “repetition.”

Students take Latin in 5th and 6th Grades, in part to reinforce lessons in grammar in English.

The full curriculum appears here.

One student reports leaving his public school to enter BASIS. His old school placed him at the top of his class in math. When he took the entrance test at BASIS, he scored 10%. That gives an idea of standards at the school.

And BASIS is not an elite school.  It has open enrollment.

“Experimenters separated seventh- and eighth-grade students into two groups—strong and weak readers as measured by standard reading tests,” Hirsch wrote. “The students in each group were subdivided according to their baseball knowledge. Then they were all given a reading test with passages about baseball.  Low-level readers with high baseball knowledge significantly outperformed strong readers with little background knowledge. Hirsch continued

The experiment confirmed what language researchers have long maintained: the key to comprehension is familiarity with the relevant subject. For a student with a basic ability to decode print, a reading-comprehension test is not chiefly a test of formal techniques but a test of background knowledge.

Dan Willingham has a nice summary of the implications in a recent blog post at the Washington Post:

We tend to teach comprehension as a series of ‘reading strategies’ that can be practiced and mastered. Unfortunately it really doesn’t work that way. The mainspring of comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read.

Prior knowledge is vital to comprehension because writers omit information. For example, suppose you read ‘He just got a new puppy. His landlord is angry.’ You easily understand the logical connection between those sentences because you know things about puppies (they aren’t housebroken), carpets (urine stains them) and landlords (they are protective of their property.)

The writer could have included all that information. The writer gambled that the reader would know about puppies, carpets and landlords. A writer who doesn’t assume some prior knowledge on the part of her readers will write very boring prose.

What happens if the reader doesn’t have the prior knowledge the writer assumed she had? The reader will be confused and comprehension breaks down.

What this means is that even if a student has mastered “reading strategies” such as identifying the thesis and how it is argued, without any background knowledge in the subject matter, those strategies don’t carry the student very far. Readers without it can’t fill in blanks and pick up subtexts and discern points of view.

This is why, when the American Federation of Teachers issued its Setting Strong Standards report in 2003, it emphasized repeatedly the importance of knowledge in all the disciplines, including English. Some statements are worth repeating here:

—–”a set of standards must embody the knowledge essential to each of the core subjects, and this cannot be accomplished by trying to fit disciplinary knowledge into broad over-arching, non disciplinary categories such as ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving.’”

—–”Strong standards must provide clear guidance to teachers, curriculum and assessment developers, textbook publishers, and others so that one person’s interpretation of the core knowledge and skills students should learn in a particular grade level or education level—elementary, middle, or high school—will be fairly similar to someone else’s.”

—–”English: The basic skills and knowledge that are the foundations of learning how to read (e.g., letter/sound recognition, decoding skills, vocabulary), reading comprehension (e.g., exposure to a variety of literary genres), writing conventions (e.g., spelling, writing mechanics), and writing forms (e.g., narrative, persuasive, expository).”

—–”It is not enough for standards to emphasize the skills students should learn but leave the content to local discretion.”

Hirsch, Willingham, and the AFT are powerful voices arguing against one of the sorriest trends in English Language Arts over the years, namely, the attempt to convert it into a skills discipline that emphasizes cross-disciplinary capacities (critical thinking, “media literacy,” reading comprehension strategies, etc.) and downplays English knowledge.

And what is “English knowledge”? Three things: philology (history and development of the English language); literary history (major periods and movements, major authors and works); criticism (theories of, approaches to, and great examples of interpretation).

In the committee room, however, those knowledges are fraught with tension. English literary history bears exclusions that people don’t like, philology asks for competences that people just don’t have, and criticism seems beyond the level of high school students.

But, counter Hirsch, Willingham, and AFT, without them, we can expect reading scores for high school students to continue as they have since NAEP started tracking them 40 years ago: a more or less flat line.

A 16-year-old boy transfers to a high school in Georgia from out of state and shows up the second day wearing a hot pink wig and high heels. He wants to use the girls’ restroom. Administrators tell him to drop the wig, and they keep him out of the girls’ room. A Facebook page with 1,700 people springs up to defend him, and T-shirts are on the way. A few fights break out over the issue. A news reporter shows up.

It sounds like a principal’s nightmare. With test scores in the state at embarrassing levels and a nearby school system losing its accreditation a year ago (the first in four decades to do so–see here), he has to deal with this?

It actually happened just last week, but the sequence of events might be a lesson in effective handling of controversial matters.

The account appears here under the headline “Pink wig, heels on boy too disruptive for school.” The young man arrived on Day Two of the school year in ultra-feminine costume. He had come from Miami to live with his sister/guardian, and his appearance sparked the expected attention, but the school responded well. The principal allowed him to use one of the administrators’ restrooms (he chose the ladies’), and they let him keep some of his attire–just drop the wig. They met with other students to keep bullying and mobbing from spreading. And they offered to sit down and talk with the young man and his sister about the school dress code, which forbids clothing that is too disruptive.

The young man has chosen to leave school, however, and officials haven’t heard back from his guardian. Halfway through the story we learn that he’s told the reporter that “he doesn’t want to go to school if he’s not allowed to dress the way he wants–in women’s clothing,” but later we read that he’ll agree to give up the wig. School officials want him to come back, and they appear lenient on most of the cross-dressing impulses.

One has to appreciate the terrain the administrators have carved out. They made all the right moves to turn what could have been a hot kettle of culture wars controversy into a whimsical (although somewhat sad) episode. Nobody is blaming the officials, and the words “homophobia” and “hetero-normativity” and “free speech” don’t come up. It’s a good lesson in diplomacy–sometimes a shrug and a smile and some rule-bending turns a provocation into a mild distraction.

• 43 percent of all two-year public college students enroll in a remedial course
• 29 percent of all four-year public college students enroll in a remedial course
• The remediation rate costs two-year schools $1.8-$2.3 billion per year
• It costs four-year schools $435-$543 million per year

Keep in mind that remediation enrollments happen because students are evaluated at the college level and deemed incapable of handling college-level work in the subject. If they can’t write a “C” or better essay on a diagnostic writing test, they go into writing remediation. In other words, remedial curricula at the college stage repeats high school-level work. Colleges are, in effect, asked to bring the students up to speed with more high school-like instruction.

And think of the labor costs. For writing remediation, English and writing/rhetoric departments go on a scramble each August as the numbers come in regarding how many courses they’ll have to run. Teachers need to be found, rooms secured, enrollments to be spread evenly, students clamoring for spaces managed, and budgets adjusted.

The big question, of course, is how effective college remediation is at drawing students into higher education and keeping them through to graduation. A recent paper by Burck Smith in the American Enterprise Institute “Outlook” series raises the question. The sober evidence there includes the disappointing fact that, of students in such courses, “40-50 percent will not complete the developmental sequence.” If they do get beyond remediation, only 29 percent earn a bachelor’s degree. That means that overall “any student who places into developmental education has only a 13 percent chance of eventually receiving a bachelor’s degree.”

Apart from the lesser destinies of those who drop out, a simple cost/benefit analysis of the college’s efforts yields a feeble result. All that work of remediation, and only 1 in 8 students eventually receives a bachelor’s degree. That kind of performance can’t continue, especially in a belt-tightening era.

Smith has one prescription to lighten the financial load. It is to make the term and its tuition fees more flexible, so that students would enroll “on a monthly subscription basis” instead of on a “per-course, flat-fee model.” Students proceed at their own pace, and are charged on “how much time they spend using facilities and how much instruction they use.” Instead of group instruction in a classroom, we would have a “call-center staffing model” in which interaction would happen online.

Smith already implements such a model with his company SMARTHINKING. The method stands or falls, of course, on the outcomes, and skepticism about such initiatives is high among college faculty members. But with such a low success rate in the existing model, we need to try other approaches. If this or that one doesn’t work, abandon it and try others.

But a report issued recently by PayScale finds many fields doing much better than finance, accounting, and marketing.  PayScale provides a listing of undergraduate college degrees by salary, and it appears here.

What PayScale did was calculate the salaries of people who earned bachelor’s degrees (not professional degrees in medicine, law, etc.) and who were hired full-time and had compiled five years or less of experience. The median person was 25 years old and had two years of experience.

It calculated salaries for people later in their careers, too, and did the same correlation with majors.

If paycheck is first consideration, the course is clear. Seven of the top ten majors were in Engineering, aerospace topping them all, with starting people earning $59,600 and mid-career people earning $109,000. The other three fields in the top ten were Economics ($50,200 and $101,000), Physics ($51,100 and $98,800), and Computer Science ($56,400 and $97,400).

Finance came in at $48,500 and $89,400, Marketing at $41,500 and $81,500, International Business at $41,900 and $77,800, and Business Administration at $42,900 and $73,000.

(Second to last was Elementary Education at $33,000 and $42,500. Education came a bit higher at $36,200 and $54,100.)

Now, this chart doesn’t tell you how hard those jobs were to get. If each engineering job had 500 applicants, and if each marketing job only had 20, then to a canny undergraduate, we might say, the lower marketing salary might have been worth the better odds.

Still, the skew toward engineering and physics and math (statistics came in at #11, math at #13) should lead more kids toward those majors. But on the 2008 American Freshman Survey, when entering students were asked about what they intended to major in, the standard preferences held steady.

Business stood at the top with 16,7% of the respondents. Next came “Professional,” then “Arts and humanities,” then “Social Sciences” (on the PayScale list, social work, sociology, psychology, and anthropology all came up under $40,000).

And Engineering? All the fields from aeronautical to chemical to civil to electrical took in 9.3% of the freshmen, and the entirety of the Physical Sciences garnered only 3.2% (!). That puts only one in eight students headed toward the most prosperous fields. And let’s note, too, that of the percentage of kids who aim for physics et al., a good portion of them likely won’t make the cut after a year of differential equations . . .

—–Almost always                     8.6%
—–Often                                22.4%
—–Sometimes                        39.1%
—–Seldom                             22.9%
—–Never                                 6.9%

Those numbers are disappointing, but most educators probably aren’t surprised that more than two-thirds of high school seniors don’t recognize the value of what they have to learn.  Maybe the low rating is just an expression of their feelings toward having to do the work rather than their genuine assessment of its meaningfulness.

Here is where the significance of longitudinal comparisons come in.  Just a few years earlier, things weren’t so bad.  Here are the numbers for 2001.

—–Almost always                10.2%
—–Often                             26.0%
—–Sometimes                    41.5%
—–Seldom                         19.0%
—–Never                             3.3%

Note how much the top and bottom figures have changed.  From 2001 to 2008, the combined “Almost always” or “Often” rate went down five percentage points, 36.2 percent to 31 percent.  At the same time, the combined “Seldom” or “Never” rate went up 7.5 points, 22.3 percent to 29.8 percent.
Go back to 1983 and the trend lengthens.  Back then, “Almost always” and “Often” took in 40.2 percent, “Seldom” and “Never” 18.3 percent.
More and more, then, the “meaningful” factor is dropping.  Why?
In this article in Educational Horizons, entitled “Toward a Connected Core Curriculum,” William G. Wraga blames it on a core curriculum that breaks subjects up into discrete pieces that students can’t put together into a coherent vision of education.  I attribute it to changes in the out-of-school lives that kids lead, specifically, the extension of social life to all hours of the day and night enabled by digital tools, which draws an ever-sharper division between in-class and out-of-class activity.

But whatever the cause, the declining meaningfulness-factor adds yet another burden to teachers.  Not only do they have to teach a subject matter, but they have to plant the conviction that their subject matter really matters.  They can’t rely on students entering their classrooms believing, “Yeah, this stuff is important, even if I don’t wanna learn it.”  Less and less do teens make the connection between a 19th-century short story and their daily lives, between World War II and career ambitions, Black Holes and the upcoming party . . .

This is more than just the old burden of “relevance.”  It may signal a new estrangement from more parts of the curriculum, and I don’t know if laptops in classrooms, more lessons in contemporary culture and youth issues, letting students pick their own books to read, and more collaborative learning are going to do one thing to stop it.

Over the years I’ve participated in many discussions of English curricula at the secondary and post-secondary level, and few topics arouse more tension than that of a recommended reading list.  Raise the prospect and people get uncomfortable.  The idea of selecting certain works for study, creating a canon of novels and poems and plays, fashioning a lineage, however multi-racial and filled with women writers it is, strikes all-too-many curriculum designers as a bad, bad idea.

Everyone knows the ostensible reasons.

One, the race/gender objection: to form a reading list of literature in English from Beowulf forward is to create a nearly all white-male grouping up until the 19th Century.  On sheer numbers it looks exclusionary and biased.

Two, the “reification” objection: the act of picking and choosing itself arrogates high powers to designers, licensing them to apply their own preferences under the guise of assembling a list of Great Books whose greatness is objective, not ideological and subjective.

Three, the local control objection: the act of picking and choosing takes discretion away from the teachers themselves.  We should let them tailor their syllabi to their own classrooms.

Four, the cultural imperialism objection: more and  more students these days are recent immigrants.  Their cultural backgrounds are far from Western traditions, and we have no basis for imposing the latter and erasing the former.

Five, the practical objection: how in the world can people in the room agree on a list without inflating it to ridiculous length?

And six, the child-centered objection: we need to be less prescriptive and give the kids more choice.  This is what the New York Times reported on just a couple of weeks ago in a story headlined “A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like.”

There are answers to each objection, of course, but in the discussions I’ve witnessed the mere utterances of one or more of them are held as decisive.  People don’t want to talk further, and the resistance to discussing them is an issue in itself.  That the objectors don’t want to go back and forth on the idea and creation of a recommended reading list suggests a deeper dynamic is in play.

I’ll say it.  I think it stems in some degree from embarrassment.  The list of classics from Old to Middle to Modern English makes them uncomfortable not for ideological or identitarian or practical reasons.  It does so for personal reasons that strike deep at their own legitimacy.  For, many of them haven’t read the works that would have to go on the list.  Maybe they got a little Chaucer in high school, a part in Julius Caesar or a paper on Huck Finn.  But it’s been a long time, and Samuel Johnson, George Eliot, Dryden, and Dreiser are far away names.  They have become experts in English Language Arts, but not erudite readers of English literary tradition. Many of them went into reading research and education-related social sciences, not into English.  Others entered English after the Theory years had passed and general reading knowledge had given way to certain interpretative skills and fluencies.

In either case, you end up with people in the English curriculum room who no longer breathe the air of English literary history.  They’ve lost interest in it, and they don’t know enough of it, but they can’t say so.  A journalist at the New York Times, Emily Eakin, proudly announced her classics-free education several years ago in an article entitled “More Ado (Yawn) about Great Books,” a shame-free confession that she “graduated without having read for credit ‘The Odyssey,’ ‘Paradise Lost,’ a single play by Shakespeare or a single novel by Jane Austen, George Eliot or Henry James.”  Blunt declarations like that would disqualify scholars from curricular discussions. Ideological and identitarian objections provide cover for their knowledge deficits, and that’s why they hold them so firmly.

Contrast their attitude to that of this young lady profiled in USA Today.

She loves great novels, and so she’s assembling short videos on them to help students make their way in, a Cliff Notes for the Digital Age. Maybe it won’t work, and the temptation toward dumbing-down and “relevance” and self-display on the part of the founder are a concern, but the simple fact of her focus on Hamlet, Great Expectations, The Scarlet Letter, etc. is worth some applause. Her aims are a nice antidote after a quote from Shakespeare leaves blank faces in the curriculum room.

The participants focused on primary and secondary school, but if students pass through those years as out-of-class, evening worker-bees, the habit doesn’t stick at the next level.  Data from large surveys of college students shows that college for all too many of them is just a part-time job.

One of the questions on the National Survey of Student Engagement asked about ”Hours per 7-day week spent preparing for class (studying, reading, writing, doing homework or lab work, analyzing data, rehearsing, and other academic activities).”  Professors estimate that strong performance in college requires about 25 hours of homework to go along with a full load of courses.  In 2008, the number of students who reached that mark was miniscule.  Fully 43 percent of first-year students and seniors came in at 10 hours or less each week.  Only 17 percent of first-years and 20 percent of seniors passed 20 hours on homework.  Eight percent of first-years and 11 percent of seniors passed 25 hours.

The lax results echoed in other surveys.  On the 2008 College Senior Survey, the breakdown for seniors doing homework was:

—–10 hours or less              58.7 percent

—–11 to 15 hours                18.1 percent

—–16 to 20 hours                12.2 percent

—–More than 20 hours        11.1 percent

And the 2007 Your First College Year survey came up with these numbers for first-year students doing homework.

—–Less than 6 hours per week          37.5 percent

—–6 to 10 hours per week                33.2 percent

—–11 or more hours per week          29.2 percent

So, those who fret about homework in high school creating lifelong anti-leisure laborers needn’t worry.  The students don’t carry the homework disposition beyond high school, at least not the vast majority of them.  And they don’t have to get up early and catch the bus five days a week, either.

Not so long ago people were trumpeting multi-tasking as a new way of learning and behaving, one that was rewiring our brains.  While books and math problems and historical maps involved a single cognitive exercise, it was said, the computer screen offered multiple engagements at once, and it thereby imposed a stronger “cognitive workout” on the user.

Children and teens were at the forefront of the practice, we were told, developing mental habits that teachers would soon have to master if they were going to keep up with their own students.  Here’s Eugene Hickok, former Deputy Secretary of Education, cited in a Federation of American Scientists report on the educational benefits of video games:

“The MTV generation is a different generation.  As my old boss used to say, ‘They’re wired differently.’  They think differently, they act differently, they want to be engaged, they’re more engaged than ever before, their attention span is quicker, they are not inclined to sit down and spend hours quietly reading a book.  They’re more inclined to be reading three or four books at one time while they multi-task on their Palm Pilots.”

Anybody believe that line about reading three or four books at once?

It’s the multi-tasking claim that really stands out, though.  For over the last several years studies have come out that dispel the very idea.  Way back in 2001, this report claimed that people don’t really multi-task.  They switch-task.  It turns out that people can’t do two things at once that exercise the same parts of the brain.  Sure, they can more or less read a book while listening to music (if it stays in the background), but they can’t watch TV while reading a book (both of them touch verbal centers).  They can’t do email while talking on the phone.

Furthermore, when people switch from one task to another, they have to undergo a process of “goal shifting” and “rule activation.”  That is, they can’t just move from one task to another without first adjusting to the goals and rules of the new task.  It may be brief, but that small “warm-up” time adds up.

The process led NPR last year to announce: “Think You’re Multitasking? Think Again.”  Here’s what an MIT professor warned:

“‘People can’t multitask very well, and when people say they can, they’re deluding themselves,’ said neuroscientist Earl Miller. And, he said, ‘The brain is very good at deluding itself.’”

And here is a story at CNN that declares “Drop that BlackBerry! Multitasking may be harmful.”  It cites a new study that “suggests that people who often do multiple tasks in a variety of media — texting, instant messaging, online video watching, word processing, Web surfing, and more — do worse on tests in which they need to switch attention from one task to another than people who rarely multitask in this way.”

So let’s hear no more about the marvelous cognitive leaps of kids with six chats going at once.

And now, if we can only dispense with those headlong celebrations of ”non-linear thinking.”

“countries with more confident students who enjoy the subject matter–and with teachers who strive to make mathematics relevant to students’ daily lives–do not do as well as countries that rank lower on indices of conficence, enjoyment, and relevance.”

It turned out that some of the highest-confidence eighth-graders were some of the worst performers, and the contrary case held as well.  U.S. students rated themselves much more highly than did students in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Chinese Taipei, but they scored well behind that insecure group.  While 93 percent of U.S. eighth-graders failed to achieve an advanced score on the test, only 5 percent of them “Disagreed a lot” with the statement that they “do well in math.”

Another report that just came out suggests that the same discorrelation between confidence and performance may hold in reading.  It appears as “Calibration of reading self-concept and reading achievement among 15-year-olds: Cultural differences in 34 countries” in the September issue of Learning and Individual Differences (volume 19, issue 3, pages 372-386).  Authors Ming Ming Chiu and Robert M. Klassen took data from many countries, examined “self-concept” and “students achievement” in reading, and found that students with under-confidence scored higher than the average in their country, while students with over-confidence scored lower.  This leads them to a firm conclusion.

“Higher reading achievement is linked to not only calibration accuracy but also calibration modesty (i.e., underestimations of performance levels). Students that were modest in their self-appraisals relative to their reading achievement – who were, in fact, underconfident – usually had reading scores that exceeded their country mean while overconfident students often had reading scores below the mean. In this regard, optimistic self-beliefs may signal a developmental lag in cognitive self-awareness.”

While the authors agree that self-confidence may be important for long-term endeavors in which motivation has to carry through from beginning to end, for “specific academic tasks . . . an optimistic or overconfident approach might be dysfunctional.”  While deep-seated doubts can, indeed, be disabling, deep-seated confidence can sometimes “mask real academic difficulties.”  In other words, over-confidence can be a sign not of prior superior achievement, but of inferior achievement, a defense mechanism against poor performance and skill level.

How are teachers in English Language Arts supposed to tell the difference?

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Last spring, in Fairburn, Georgia, officials in two schools piloted a startling attendance program. If struggling 8th and 11th graders showed up for study hall, they could earn $8 an hour, and if their grades and test scores rose significantly, they would receive a bonus. An Associated Press story termed the policy a “bribe,” and a Georgia State University professor on National Public Radio declared it “morally bankrupt.” But Ben Chavis, then principal of American Indian Public Charter School in East Oakland, California, had started paying students for attendance years ago with steady results, doubling math scores in the school over time. “Poor people love money,” he explains, so why not let it motivate the kids? He even met with drug dealers off campus and offered them $5 for every truant they brought back. The cash came from creative budgeting, for instance, no computers for the kids. (“They can’t read,” he declares, “they don’t need a computer!”)

Chavis is one of a handful of school mavericks profiled in Flunked, a 45-minute documentary narrated by actor Joe Mantegna. The film reviews 50 years of public school investment, from Sputnik to No Child Left Behind, and derives a simple lesson: the claim “more money makes more success” is a myth, “the tallest tale of them all.” In spite of massive investment and however you measure it, one commenter says, academic achievement “looks like somebody just died—it’s just a flat line.” Success lies not in raising dollars but in changing the organization.

The “all-stars” in Flunked illustrate how it can happen. They are “entrepreneurial principals,” headstrong heroes who rescue failing schools, run charters, tighten discipline, and lower dropout rates. Steve Barr runs Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles, which divides dysfunctional high schools into small charter schools. His first principle: get every dollar into classrooms. He pays teachers well and grants them wide latitude in the classroom in exchange for a “dismissal-for-cause” condition in their contracts. Howard Lappin, who took on a high school in L.A.—“1,600 kids, out-of-control school, violent, terrible test scores”—recites his message for kids: “if you’re not in class you’re in trouble—your parents are gonna be in—we’re gonna talk to you—you’re not gonna be here—you got to do what you got to do because this is a school—this is not a playground.”

The ingredients are plain and they don’t include “Give us more money.”

• Provide strict discipline, longer hours, high expectations
• Give teachers high pay and discretion in the classroom, but hold them to professional standards
• Reduce bureaucracy

A sound approach for these schools, but on the evidence of another recent school documentary, the lessons of Flunked may not apply as we move up the U.S. public school ladder. Two Million Minutes profiles two high schoolers in Bangalore, India, two in Shanghai, China, and two in Carmel High School outside Indianapolis. Ranked in the top 5 percent of U.S. public schools, Carmel has loads of money and top-notch facilities. No need to fire any teachers or collar truants. But, as the film unfolds, a striking deficiency among the American students emerges, one that no in-school policy can address—the drive to compete with their peers.

“Competitiveness,” of course, has become a touchstone of education debate. Two years ago in the Washington Post, Bill Gates warned that unless Americans hit the workplace with math and science skills, they will sink in the knowledge economy and take their nation with them. But American students appear unaffected by what one commenter after another says in Two Million Minutes: We are in a global competition, and we’re losing. From 1985 to 2004, the proportion of bachelor’s degrees awarded in math or science in this country fell from 21.7 to 15.8 percent. Engineering went from 9.8 to 6.2 percent, and the numbers won’t improve soon. On the 2006 American Freshman Survey, only 0.8 percent of entering college students intended to major in math, 0.5 percent in physics. These fields are a micro-niche.

For Asian students, though, math and science degrees are the way to prosperity. These students live with “economic uncertainty,” the film explains, and view math and science study as a form of “economic opportunism,” a “passport out of poverty.” The girl from India wants to be rich, and she terms engineering the “safest” field. She attends a two-hour math tutorial that starts at 7:45 each Saturday morning, and after a break, three more hours of class follow. The boy from India aims to be a physicist (as are his father and sister), and he spends 12 hours a week in evening sessions preparing for the Indian Institute of Technology entrance exam. A half million take the test and only 5,000 win admission. The Chinese boy took his first standardized test in 1st grade, and his regular school day lasts nine hours. He doesn’t claim to be number one, but he loves to win and is, in fact, the top math student in his school. It’s not all math and science. Though the Chinese girl wants a biology career, along with her full school schedule she studies ballet and violin.

And the suburban American kids? The boy is senior class president and a National Merit semifinalist, and the girl ranks in the top 3 percent of her class. He admits, though, “Occasionally, I do homework,” and for a big class project due on Monday he starts preparing a day earlier. She claims to “set high expectations,” but adds, “I’m not that 9-to-5 kind of girl.” She favors medicine because “you get an awesome feeling, it’s really a rewarding experience, I think, being able to, um, save lives.” She’s “well-rounded,” which means doing homework with friends while watching Grey’s Anatomy. He doesn’t “ever want a cubicle,” so he works 20 hours a week in a pasta joint and does graphics for the school paper.

Teachers reflect the same laxity. When handing out an exam, the Carmel teacher assures his students that on one question, “I will accept three of the four answers.” In the Indian classroom, the teacher explains the steps in a calculation and concludes, “Nobody should say ‘I don’t know how to find the tangent.’” When the students pause, she blurts out, “Why are you simply standing there?” Nobody chides the American kids like that.

The American boy wins early admission and a full ride to Purdue, while the American girl gets into Indiana University. They are accepted into top universities, so why work any harder? The policies advocated in Flunked are not the answer here. More money in the classroom and less bureaucracy in the schools will make no difference, nor will stricter discipline or higher expectations as long as the college acceptances come through.

Not one of the Asian kids gets into the first-choice college. That outcome explains the relative efforts, and it puts the American high performers in a dismaying light. Asian kids don’t talk about their “awesome” feelings of helping people. They talk about how it feels to beat the kids sitting next to them. If the American boy and girl landed in an Asian classroom, they would sink to the bottom in a week. Call it classroom Darwinism with predictable results. It’s a survival-of-the-smartest world, with few survivors.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

“whats new? glad I put u on my top and im not on urs. its cool though. whats been new? REPN TRI to the FULLEST!!!”

So goes a comment on a MySpace page I just pulled up. Enter and the cursor turns into a Cleveland Browns helmet. We have boxes with videos to play, 181 people in the “Friend Space,” photos, blog, and a personal quiz (“Shoplifted?: Tic-Tacs when I was 2. Seen Someone Shoplift?: I work in retail…come on.”). Words, images, and sounds tumble forth as the host broadcasts dreams and realities. It’s a hive of creative expression, puerile and barbarous, yes, but at least an attempt at imagination.

Download a million other personal pages of teens and the same graphics and sentiments spill out. The bustle and popularity make personal profiles the space of invention. In October 2006, Nielsen//NetRatings found that nine of the top-ten web sites for 12- to 17-year-olds provided content or tools for social networking. An April 2007 Pew/Internet study recorded 55 percent of online teens with profiles, and no doubt the number keeps rising. So does the social networking idiom, and if you can’t write it you suffer the digital equivalent of missing kickball at recess.

What a contrast to the prose they write for school. In papers for English, history, and civics, the brio disappears. Yes, they fix the spelling and drop the pesky slang, but the style flattens into monotonous blank assertions rendered in commonplace words. They lose the self-promotion—a good thing—but also the features that produce evocative descriptions and persuasive opinions. No sharp metaphors, mots justes, nifty rhythms and parallels, or punctuating sounds.

This isn’t just a verbal deficiency. It follows an assumption students make when they write about serious subjects. Lower the energy, they think; dim the rhetoric; just get the facts and ideas straight. Intellectual discourse is neutral, colorless, vapid. Verbal dash is verboten.

And why shouldn’t they think so when the primary knowledge source delivers just that kind of parlance? The source is Wikipedia, of course. Type a date, name, event, or law into the search box and it always comes up near the top (see “Wikipedia or Wickedpedia?” what next, Spring 2008). That’s one reason why, so I’ve heard, the percentage of Google searches that click past the first page is less than one! Thirty years ago, students with a paper due on a modern novel or ancient myth consulted encyclopedias, CliffsNotes, almanacs, Time-Life collections, and a dozen other reference works. Today, browsing through those heavy tomes isn’t necessary. Wikipedia has it all with a quick click, a handy trove of info students consult first and, often, last.

The site is criticized for its superficiality, erroneousness, and amateurism, but, in fact, Wikipedia provides ready access to a fact, definition, or overview. No, the real problem with Wikipedia is a stylistic one. Read a dozen entries on the similar topics and they all sound the same. The outline is formulaic, the prose numbingly bland. Sentences unfold in tinny sequence. Perspectives arise in overcareful interplay. If a metaphor pops up, it’s a dead one. Consider the entry on Moby-Dick:

Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a great white whale of tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaling ships know of Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered the whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab’s boat and bit off Ahab’s leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge on the whale.

Compare that to a sentence from Collier’s Encyclopedia, first published in 1950: “As he makes very clear to Starbuck, his first mate, Captain Ahab envisions in Moby-Dick the visible form of a malicious Fate which governs man thoughtlessly…” Or the description of Ahab in the 1953 Encyclopedia Americana: “a crazed captain whose one thought is the capture of a ferocious monster that had maimed him…” Or even this in CliffsNotes from 1966: “Ahab’s monomania is seen then in his determination to view the White Whale as the symbol of all the evil of the universe.”

Wikipedia has eclipsed them all. We may admire it as a useful repository of information, but as a model of discourse, it’s a killjoy. Students use it so much that they think Wikipedia prose is the right way to write in intellectual settings. We end up with verbal poles that preserve the worst of each. In social networking, we have inane content and energetic style. On Wikipedia, we have informative content and wooden style. It’s a new digital divide, one that separates leisure habits from coursework even further. It makes teens believe that intellectual expression is a leaden, spiritless thing, and that’s an educational outcome that can last the rest of their lives.

-Mark Bauerlein is professor of English and director of the Program in Democracy and Citizenship at Emory University.

By Daniel H. Pink

Riverside Books, 2006 (Revised edition, paper), $15.00; 275 pages.

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Readers of Education Next have probably observed the oscillation that music, dance, theater, and visual arts teachers suffer in their professional lives. At one pole, they love their material, and recounting what the arts do for young minds sends them into effusive testimonials to the unique powers of their disciplines. At the other pole, they regret the marginal place of the arts in the curriculum. With employers demanding better workplace skills from recent graduates, they say, and No Child Left Behind pushing reading and math, the arts scramble to maintain a foothold in the school week. Those are the dominant themes—a practice that sparks creative and disaffected kids, and a system that shunts it aside.

The situation leaves arts educators ever on the lookout for help. Howard Gardner has bolstered them for decades, his theory of multiple intelligences granting the arts a special role in the education of the whole mind. A few years ago, economist Richard Florida argued that demographic and technological factors have produced a “creative class” of artists, writers, and designers, and also software developers, media entrepreneurs, and hip capitalists. This creative class, he maintained, provides the energy to foster urban renewal and growth. Cities that invested in the arts, bike paths, architecture, etc., thrived throughout the 1990s, and other cities better do the same if they want to survive, Florida warned. Now comes another theorist who has captured the enthusiasm of arts educators. Daniel Pink is a business/technology writer who two years ago proclaimed in “Revenge of the Right Brain” (Wired, February 2005) that a sweeping paradigm shift was under way. Pink phrased it in capital-letter terms: the Information Age of the 1990s rewarded “linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs,” but we have entered a new epoch, the Conceptual Age, whose economy runs on “inventive, empathic abilities.” The skills of computing, calculating, diagnostics, and basic legal work are losing their value in the United States. They retain their importance, Pink assures, but any activity that can be reduced to rules and instructions will go into a software program, such as TurboTax®, replacing tax accountants, or end up “migrating across the oceans” to India and China.

The two forces he labels “Asia” and “Automation” have changed the U.S. job market forever, pushing domestic labor into more creative practices. Another one, “Abundance,” adds a consumer factor to the evolution. In the last 30 years, Pink says, wealth has spread and deepened. Life is good, and “the information economy has produced a standard of living that would have been unfathomable in our grandparents’ youth.” With material needs met, people want more than functionality from their goods. They want pleasing aesthetics, and they elevate “less rational sensibilities—beauty, spirituality, emotion.” It’s a Big Idea, this epochal transition from Information Age to Conceptual Age, and the analysis of it could lead into demographic, financial, and geopolitical fields. In A Whole New Mind, Pink tracks it down to a smaller but still central terrain, the individual mind. For the transformations in jobs and goods, he claims, have a complement in the physiology of the brain, and in the styles of cognition that go with it. The Information Age solicits the powers of the left hemisphere, the aptitudes of analysis and numeracy and information management. The Conceptual Age solicits the powers of the right hemisphere, aptitudes of imagination, invention, and empathy. The left side, L-thinking, deals in pieces and series, while R-thinking makes pictures and discerns patterns. L-thinking breaks things down into parts. R-thinking assembles them into wholes. L-thinking conceives things by how they work, R-thinking by how they give pleasure and are meaningful. L-thinking fits a data-oriented economy, R-thinking an idea-oriented one.

That we have entered the latter condition Pink treats as plain. The example of Target stores proves the ascendancy, as it hires world-class designers to provide sleek toilet brushes and cool wastebaskets for budget-conscious consumers. But a problem lingers, he says: Information Age habits and assumptions remain in force. Information Age skills have served so well and yielded so much well-being that people don’t realize the conversion in process.

Pink’s book is an announcement of the turn, and an advice manual. The paradigm shift he takes care of in 60 pages, then devotes six chapters to ways of developing “a whole new mind.” Each chapter covers a new “sense” in a nomenclature that will thrill arts educators: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, Meaning. Design adds beauty to function, Story adds drama to argument, Meaning adds, well, meaning to material plenty, etc. Pink supplies concrete tips for joining the movement: “Keep a Design Notebook,” he counsels, and “When you see a great design, make a note of it.” To cultivate empathy, eavesdrop on conversations and try to feel the others’ feelings. To deepen the sense of play, join online communities for gamers, or dissect a joke. Take an acting class, read Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, and learn to draw on the right side of the brain.

But while the case for arts programs in the Conceptual Age might seem logical, educators should proceed cautiously. For one thing, whether such creative, higher-order skills of the Conceptual Age can prosper without lower-order aptitudes being mastered first is a debatable proposition. I’ve seen too many students being told that “critical thinking” and “meaning-making” activities are the talents they should master, even though they struggle with algebra, misplace commas, and commit basic fallacies. Second, perhaps artistic geniuses can get by without learning to spell or multiply, but the rest better learn the fundamentals. Target isn’t hiring thousands of designers for its goods. It hires “titans such as Karim Rashid and Philippe Starck.” Besides, the outsourcing trend may be exaggerated. For instance, the number of highly skilled industrial jobs in the United States jumped by 36 percent from 1983 to 2002, and cities such as Dubuque, Iowa; Grand Forks, North Dakota; Charleston, South Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia, have become sizzling economies for skilled blue-collar workers (see “The Myth of Deindustrialization,” Wall Street Journal, 6 Aug 2007).

As with any paradigm assertion, larger questions arise, especially in this case, the tempo implied. The Industrial Revolution took decades to happen. The subsequent Industrial Age lasted a couple of centuries before the Digital Revolution arrived 20 years ago. According to Pink, the Information Age has already petered out, at least in the United States. Has the lifetime of ages so contracted that before most people adjust to them they have already ended? Can human beings and human societies change that quickly?

Most of all, are students ready for right-brain conceptualization when only 23 percent of 12th graders reach “proficiency” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress math exam, 35 percent on the reading exam, and 13 percent on the U.S. history exam? For now, keep them on grammar and long division. Ten years from today, A Whole New Mind will join the long list of futurist visions that had its moment and disappeared.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English and director of the Program in Democracy and Citizenship at Emory University.